Tag: online

Smileychik33 shocks YouTube community by leaving neutral video comment

Briana HansenLeave a comment

Adele, a 16-year-old honors student from Milwaukee, regularly watches YouTube videos like most kids her age. While watching the videos, she signs in as “smileychik33”, and often comments on each video after watching it.

“It’s clearly very important to have an opinion about each video you watch, and to share that opinion with the entire world,” she says. She explains that youth have grown up knowing how important it is that they share their voice and opinion with the rest of of the world by leaving comments and rating certain videos, no matter what endlessly shifting criteria they choose to use to rate them.

“Usually, you either write “LOL” or some combination of letters that make it obvious you’re laughing hysterically if you like the video, or you write something scathing and personally offensive,” Adele further explains. “The more you can personally insult both the people involved in the video project and the other people who have commented on it, the more effective your post is. Grammar, spelling, punctuation and factual evidence are not important.”

Last week, however, Adele-under her username “smileychik33”- decided to leave a comment under a video that was neither scathing nor a compliment. She simply wrote, “Watched it. Fine.”

Though the inclusion of the word “fine” may seem like she was approving of it, she assuredly answers that “fine” is neutral in the world of the internet. The attention-starved people who regularly put up and comment on videos need much more than “fine” to feel like their work has been approved of.

Her lack of opinion sent shockwaves throughout the YouTube community. A wave of other users immediately began to insult her neutrality, forcing her to take a side one way or another on the video so they could better come to rash decisions about how they felt about not only the video, but about her as a human being. After the wave of insults came another wave of users who defended Adele’s comment and retorted insults to those who were insulting her in the first place.

As the digital debate rages on, Adele remains neutral. “The video was fine. Nothing great, nothing horrible. Just fine. I refuse to add anything else to my comment,” she states.

For many YouTube users, however, her neutrality is “waiii not wiked kewl” and some consider her a “b^!@#”.

Onslaught of detailed tweets affirms water on outside window is rain

Briana HansenLeave a comment

Charlene Grandview heard small taps on her outside window as she sat in her living room in Springfield, Illinois. As she looked at the window, there seemed to be some sort of watery substance that was hitting the window panes. Unsure where to look for further details on the mystery, she logged onto her trusty Twitter and began checking the Tweets of people she knew were local.

Many of the Tweets discussed rain or the rain they were hearing outside their window. Many of them used the rain as an excuse for not exercising or any number of other excuses for not doing a simple act. These numerous Tweets she read and responded to, affirmed for Hoffer that it was, in fact, raining outside her window.

“Sure, I could have just checked Weather.Com or logged on to my local online news source and found out if it’s raining in my area, but I figured Twitter would be more up to date than those sources,” Hoffer claims.

When asked if she considered simply stepping outside to see if it was raining or not, she looked befuddled and said, “But, I could get wet. Plus, I wanted to see what was trending at the time.”

Facebook “pirate talk” option makes pirates finally feel like part of the online community

Briana HansenLeave a comment

Frownin’ Hank Morgan wears a bit of a toothless smile these days underneath his greasy, thick beard. Morgan, a life-long pirate, pillager, and overall chaos-causer, has made over 500 friends on Facebook since April, thanks to the Facebook pirate talk option. Even for this interview, Morgan had to speak through his translator, Ms. Penelope Muffet, to ensure more effective communication.

Morgan growled a long, low tone, licked his lips and burped. Ms. Muffet quickly translated his message, “Mr. Morgan is very excited about this new application on Facebook. He is constantly meeting and interacting with people all over the seven seas, but he feels a little disconnected. It can be disheartening to aways be making and losing friends.” Morgan has recently put his engagement to his long-time girlfriend online for the world to see. His new profile proudly states he is ‘Betrothed to the swashbuckler Smilin’ Azriel Smithe’. He screamed loudly and stabbed a knife into the wooden table he was sitting at. Ms. Muffet added, “He feels like he’s finally part of a community.”

Facebook, the online social networking site, has opened its doors to many people over the years, with hundreds of language options available at the push of a button. After huge demand from the pirate community, wanting a place online to call their own, they added the option of English (Pirate), in which the entire site translates to pirate code. Within weeks of its implementation, hundreds of pirates were pillaging a new spot…the world wide web.

Speaking again on Morgan’s behalf, Ms. Muffet assures us that pirates are highly intelligent, highly trained people who want to be a part of the online revolution. Their very distinct language and sentence structure makes it hard to learn new languages. With limited language skills, it can be hard to join the mainstream culture. Facebook has changed all that for Morgan and many of his peers. Morgan punched one man and spit in another’s soup. Ms. Muffet added, “They are, in their own way, extremely grateful.”