Laina Morris - The Meme and the Person

Laina Morris aka Overly Attached Girlfriend

Hi again! Welcome back to a session of semiotics (normally) attached to the world of Internet. Our target for today is Laina Morris, mostly known among the Internet users as "Overly Attached Girlfriend".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oVb25gYKyY&index=93&list=UUzFGVUm_s5HP8d7u5vid_jw

Laina has never told her real second name, so we don't know whether it stands for Walker nor for Morris but her image is already created.

The most interesting fact is that, her image. She is shown both as a meme /mi:m/ and as a youtuber. In fact, the day this post has been updated, she has 1.215M subscribers since 2012.

On June 6th, 2012, YouTuber wzr0713 uploaded a webcam video titled “JB Fanvideo” in which she performs a parody rendition of Justin Bieber’s latest single “Boyfriend” with personalized lyrics. According to Gawker’s article, the video was submitted in response to Bieber’s announcement of an online sing-off contest in promoting his celebrity perfume “Girlfriend.”

 - knowyourmeme

The same day her image was launched, images like these were found all across the Internet:

Like PewDiePie, we can find that Laina's first contact is the gaze, as a meme and also as a youtuber. She always stares at the camera but does it in two ways, either as a vlogger that tells the story or as OAG (Overly Attached Girlfriend), opening her eyes to look like the creepy fictitious partner of the viewer's narratee. She always attracts the spectators catching their eyes.

Her pose is always close. Only few times she can be exposed in a full body framework, nor looking outside of it (if she does, it occurs in sketches, when she is looking at the other person). The action is relaxed and the movement is little, so that the viewer can feel empathy. Despite of this, OAG opens fully her eyelids and gets closer but only when performing the stalking and clingy couple she performs.

Even acting as OAG, the viewer can infer her personality and have a trustful look even the possible bias short-humour viewers can have. The colours help. Her palette is green and blue and some rosy for her skin and the environment (the house of her hall, her room walls...), and they are well pasted, so an agreeable atmosphere is created.

These facts of relaxation and harmony help the viewer to skip over the irony of being an insane controller and see it as a fact for fun.

Furthermore, she speaks like a common girl: no restricted slang, no bizarre expressions, not unexpected high tones.  Her vocabulary and form of speak is characterized to have a cadence of Standard English, in contrast to other youtubers like Markiplier, who has a marked accent coming from the state he was born and the one he was raised. Laina comes from Texas, but she does not speak in such stereotypical way.

The most used expression by Laina is "to be like", which is an informal way to perform reported speech, usually from other person, to make depictions of actions and comparisons. 

Just to add, she donates the money she is given to the charity, so we can find an affection by their fans that is very justifiable. 

Thank you for reading!

Sources:

- Know Your Meme (from cheezburguer.com), last seen 2014/12/07

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/overly-attached-girlfriend

Bibliography:

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

About visual metaphors and presupposed knowledge

As you can see, this is a meme image.

You might think, as an spectator, that this cannot have any aim for the study, more than the information given. In fact, it gives us much more information than the letters give. But what does it? The answer is as simple: images.

The first issue where we can extract the information from this images is, as stated in the post, from background knowledge. Are there 9gag fans here? Any Breaking Bad fans? No? We will explain, then.

Since a person acquires the meaning of something, we can apply it to different contexts in real life. For instance, the red colour in traffic signs whether the lights and the STOP post tell us, "pay attention and stop!". Since learned, all of us look at red signals of every kind and stop and pay attention. This is called presupposed knowledge.

This image with letters within it on the right border is called a meme, a cultural representation used as a symbol in the web. This symbol is used to point out at actual and curious scientific acts but it has a background.

“Yeah Science, Bitch” is an expression associated with the character Jesse Pinkman (played by Aaron Paul) from the television drama series Breaking Bad. On the web, the phrase is often used to humorously express one’s enthusiasm for new discoveries and practical applications of scientific knowledge.

- knowyourmeme.com

This is an idea conceptualized, which meaning is projected to the real world through this concept. This one is the bridge that our minds cross to reach from the meaning to the external world.

The other way we can find to reach to the meaning is by our own abilities as observers. How can we do that? Simply by the observation. Let us take a look to this bird:

What does come to our minds when we look it? Do not be shy to tell it. This animal is bizarre as hell! Look at his eyes! How are its pupils so unequally elapsed! What does he think?! 

And this is the purpose. Now you can feel identified with it. Think about something really strange you do everyday. Yet too shy? Knowyourmeme.com gives us 

Weird Stuff I Do Potoo, also known as Peculiar Potoo, is an advice animal image macro series featuring a photograph of a potoo bird accompanied by captions confessing strange idiosyncrasies and other unique behaviors.

 -Knowyourmeme.com

Sources:

- Know Your Meme (from Cheezburguer.com), last seen 2014/12/04 

http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/687069-weird-stuff-i-do-potoo

- Know Your Meme (from cheezburguer.com), last seen 2014/12/04

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/yeah-science-bitch

- http://connormcfergus.tumblr.com/post/104193423343/linguistics-studying-on-late-hours

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)