Analysis and Reflection
1.
From TheParodyBoys on May 18, 2009. It seems that this video has had no direct impact on digital networked culture, but just type in “iPhone pardoy” into YouTube and the sheer volume and diversity of the videos seems to hint that there is perhaps something important about this iPhone commercial parody. My piece is similar only in that the extremity of actions (in my case creating a “mobile” scrabble board and ParodyBoys coming up with unrealistic applications) draws attention to the silliness of some of the real iPhone applications. I don’t think their piece is saying anything profound about how applications affect a person’s life, perhaps other than we use them for interesting and pointless? reasons. My video on the other hand did not paint “words with friends” in a completely bad light- or at least that was not my goal.
2. and
These videos come directly from the UK’s Sun Newspaper, but user comments have been disabled by the user. I really enjoyed this video, because I think that it engaged with some issues I wish I had developed more in my own video- that “old” media don’t mean it is outdated media. There is nothing inherently inconvenient about reading a newspaper and I think The Sun does a good job of conveying that. Just because a “new” technology comes along that incorporates and appropriates an older media does not mean that the old must give into the new. My piece is different in that I really did wish to convey more of the differences between Scrabble and “words with friends.” In my video change was what I wanted to convey; in The Sun’s it was similarity.
P.S. I would like to note that the initial inspiration for this project came from 1. watching my friends play words with friends and spell out “cat” every game and 2. from the interesting documentary Word Wars. You can watch it on Netflix.
