#17: Barak Obama says “we won’t know what to protect”
In writing about fakeness itself as a foundational element of YouTube in 2009, I bemoaned the chilling effects of Barack Obama being heralded as the “YouTube President.”
President Obama, speaking recently about Facebook’s fake news problem, continued along this perhaps too-open vein: “If everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won’t know what to protect.”Obama’s YouTube jam goes like this: the serious usually marks the funny, but in his version, get this: the serious is… the serious. Really. YouTube is all irony, all the time, and our YouTube President wittily plays it against itself. Sincerely folks, on YouTube, who came first, Tina Fey or Sarah Palin? I think you know the answer. On YouTube, what gets watched more: Obama’s fire-side chats, Obama Girl, Obama on Ellen, or Obama via Will.i.am? Yes, we can. Irony-free? “No, you can’t.”
In 2009, as if in direct conversation with today’s tired President, and the dilemma that I had regretfully anticipated, I suggested:
Only seven years later, it appears that the ironic free-fall I claimed might result from over-enjoying our first YouTube/Google+ President has indeed contributed to the making of our even newer internet president, who recently broadcast his own executive remarks on YouTube. According to The New York Times: “The video underscored the extent to which Mr. Trump intends to try to navigate around the traditional newspaper and television media outlets as he seeks to communicate his message to the public.”that there are real perils for a visual culture (and the real it is or will be) where irony becomes so dominant as to be invisible. Irony, and the fake documentary that often packages it, has served long and well as a modernist distancing device, sometimes productively enabling a structure for radical critique. As YouTube makes this style omnipresent, however, its function changes, its edges soften, the firm ground of the resolute double deconstructs beneath our feet. We are in ironic free-fall. We plunge into a viewing posture of disbelief, uncertainty, and cynicism about everything on YouTube, about watching it, about believing.
For More of my Fakery:
- “The Increasingly Unproductive Fake,” Alexandra Juhasz
- F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing, Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner, eds. (2006)