Youtubers and Politicians

Sometimes I wonder how does people in the screen make to catch us and keep attending to the luminous display and making us think. Furthermore, people are used to idolize somebody for their actions and careers. The most flagrant case may be the one of the Argentinian football player Maradon whose achievements reached to the creation of a church in his name.

But let us go a step closer to us, to the word of speakers and displays. What does make us pay attention to people? Their image and their words.

It can be impossible to think about but, can we relate President Barack Obama with PewDiePie? Yes, we can (no pun intended). This is not going to be a completely scientifical article as I kept doing these past weeks, but an opinion based on experience. 

First of all, these are the sources.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hg8ntdSbmCk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l74xXbJmTHM

I didn't typed the name on the urls on purpose so the readers cannot prejudice the content. Once you had seen them, let us ponder about these photograms:

Both mr: Obama and PewDiePie are talking to their respective interviewers. Their gaze goes out of the frame in a middle direction (not up nor down) and they smile while talking. The position of the camera is close and mid-frontal, so there is a space for letting presuppose the interviewer. Evenmore,  both are wearing a blazer with white shirt.

Despite the endless braces pit that separates both (language, country, social position, career, age...), there are elements that join them. But, as we always do, let us look into one step forward:

The movement in their eyes: it is quite common for a person to deviate the look from the interviewer. These are lapses people take to rest their minds, reorganize words and put them in the speech, The gestures with the eyeballs while talking are almost the same! Both look right downwards!(PewDiePie makes a difference but it is lesser) This fact called my attention because mr. Obama has lots of hours of training behind to behave in front of the camera and transmit whatever he wants to transmit but Felix is an amateur, more whether we talk about TV interviews.

Prosody and length of the sentences: This fact is even more impressive taking into account the gap existing between English and Swedish (Felix's native language). I am not making a prosodic nor syntactic analysis but leave it to the hearer's interpretation, and hope to be suprised if they realize.

The elimination of the "capitalism" factor: it can be thought of a stupid fact, but offering an interview with public media instead of the ones that the subjects own has to do with the empathy spectators might feel for them while displayed. Both videos are from 2014 summer and a similar length. Just to add, the interview is spontaneous, so they answer what they know. This is, both won NOTHING for the interview and that leaves us a neutrality to think about them, albeit the disparity of the topics they are discussing.

And these were my realizations of today! I hope you enjoyed them and like them if so!

Thank you for watching!

Sources:

- "The New York Times" Youtube Channel, "EXCLUSIVE OBAMA INTERVIEW: China as a Free Rider | The New York Times", (seen 2014/12/13)

- "SwedenmagicExtra" Youtube Channel, "Interview with Pewdiepie, June 2014 Sweden (HD)", (seen 2014/12/13)

PewDiePie - The Image

PewDiePie - The Image

Hello everybody! Welcome to my first blog entry!

As all of us have great dreams, I have one: analyzing the biggest tubers speech and how they are, how they are changing us and the way language is used.

To begin with, I would like to start with PewDiePie. I am not a hater. Quite far from that, I am a fan of him and like his "Let's Play!" section.

The incoming analysis follows the patterns given by Kress and van Leewen's Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. According to this book, we are going to observe briefly and in scientific terms how his image affect to us.

First of all, his eyes. Pewd's eyes are very marking in the concept of his brandmark. As we can see in the presentation of his channel, he has a half frontal image in which he is looking the spectator.

His eyes are half-closed, albeit in his vlogs he looks frontally to the camera as we can see in these images.

PewDiePie not nly looks at the camera but also to the viewers

Nevertheless, when he gets into action, he looks out of the photo frame and down, to the computer screen.

Both of the gazes show up a kind of sympathy with the viewer. The direct look shows a direct dialogue, while the second one, following a diagonal line (usually), shows a kind of comradeship with the person at the other side of the screen as if both were playing the game, like a team. Furthermore, this feeling is increased by the simultaneous playing. For instance, if both, the player and the spectator are scared by a monster in the game, they get the same feeling at the same time. Even more, it is possible they connect their gazes everytime this happens.

PewDiePie's pose has also a big matter of importance in his pose and movement. The pose in all of his photos is from close to mid-close distance and front to mid-front. This happens every time, since he is doing gameplays, to vlogs and yet his youtube main page. This gives the sensation of proximity to him, like standing by his side.

The movement he denotes in his photos varies but also depict his personality. PewDiePie tends to be static and grin, and to move backwards and open his eyes and mouth in a gesture of terror.

This is the example of his typical colour palette

Finally, the colour of PewDiePie is turquoise blue, white and sometimes clear green. These colours are faded, quite relaxing but in contrast with the horror vacui (absence of free space) that usually happens in the thumbnails of his videos. This issue points to the purpose of entertaining and fun he has. To add more, his logo (the front fist with a P embedded in it) also has his colours.

Nevertheless, this changes when the thematic changes, like for instance, in horror gameplays thumbnails. Then the colours adapt to the tetric atmosphere they are usually given (black, red and gray).

This was my first analysis. I hope you enjoyed it and that I may continue uploading these observations.

Thank you!

Bibliography: 

- Kress, G. and T. van Leeuwen: "Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design"; Routledge, London (2003)