For our practical test, we decided to respond to the ‘amateur’ characteristic. A lot of amateur content on YouTube and other platforms is made up of remixes, commentaries and parodies, so we thought doing something along those lines would give us some insight into the creation of amateur content, as well as being simple to create. We took the trailer for a terrible looking video game (Life of Black Tiger) and made a parody trailer for its ‘game of the year edition’, essentially just poking a bit of fun at it with some dramatic music and fake reviews.

While I’ve made some amateur content like this before, I thought more about the process as we created this video and tried to associate it with some of the things we discussed during the first couple of weeks. In particular, Miles’ (2007) reading on network literacy felt relevant. Responding to a video such as the ‘Life of Black Tiger’ trailer, or remixing a video or piece of music, is a way of participating as a peer in an online environment. You don’t need technical skill necessarily, but you need network literacy to go through the necessary steps to navigate your way through those environments.

This also made me think about the Bob Ross Twitch stream that I spoke about in my first blog post. The chat during the stream were all participating in the event, and had one thing in common – they were network literate. Perhaps amateur content is mainly a way for people to communicate online: to tell a joke, send a message or make a commentary. This would align with the disregard for quality and focus on the meaning instead.

I think amateur content is an extremely interesting and huge part of the internet, so it’s difficult to put it all in one basket, however I want to keep exploring it throughout the course. One thing I would love to continue to research is the nature of extremely popular amateur content and how some of it manages to circulate so much, as mentioned in my first blog post, as well as the humour of poorly made content. Until then, I feel as if I’ve scratched the surface of the topic and it has piqued my interest for future assignments.

References: 

Miles, Adrian. “Network Literacy: The New Path to Knowledge.” Screen Education, Autumn.45 (2007): 24-30.