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• 1 2017-11-06T18:28:38-08:00 #17: Barak Obama says “we won’t know what to protect” 9 February 24, 2017 plain 2019-07-23T22:22:45-07:00
  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.”

  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.”

  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.”
  
  In 2009, as if in direct conversation with today’s tired President, and the dilemma that I had regretfully anticipated, I suggested:

  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.

  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.”
  
  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)

  To see a poetic response to this hardtruth:

  Voyeurism is me you
• 1 2019-07-23T22:18:36-07:00 Voyeurism is me you 2 plain 2020-02-17T01:08:00-08:00 Voyeurism is me you 
  eating popcorn eating skittles watching 
  The Latest Bad Thing unravel 
  You like to say 
  There has been another school shooting in America 
  & read me the details off your phone 
  17 confirmed dead, suspect arrested 
  little newsreader 
  You said you wanted to die in a big american swimming pool 
  I said I wanted to speak truthfully with you in a swimming pool cafe 
  I like to say 
  We have to get married now anyway 
  because we stayed up together 
  eating crisps eating leftover pasta watching 
  the 2016 election results 
  My future children, in their perfect television accents will ask me 
  Where were you when you heard? What world did you hear it in? 
  & I want that moment to be perfect
  
  By Annie Dobson
   

  This poem is a response to hardtruth #17:

  #17: Barak Obama says “we won’t know what to protect”