Private vs Public: Social Media as a Diary and the Logan Paul Incident

Humphrey begins Chapter 2 by looking at the history of documentation of daily activities with the earliest and most commonly used form of social media the diary. No, this isn’t exclusively the thing that your sister kept in her room and got pissed off at you if you read, but rather any form of first person narrative that one wrote about experienced throughout their day-to-day lives. There are many different genres of ‘diaries’ on the spectrum of public to private, but there’s no doubt that social media has changed the way that we look at this type of documentation.

Social media entries are similar to these ‘diary’ entries in that they share day-to-day information from the perspective of the writer, even if what they portray a situation as isn’t entirely accurate. Humphreys then goes on to argue about the routinization of social media, that is turning social media into a part of our daily routine, just as one would a diary. She argues that participating in social media allows us the opportunity to process the day’s events and that this ritual can act as a conjunction between thought in word, somewhat forming a seemingly ‘symbiotic’ relationship between the mind and the outside world.

On the subject of private vs personal, Karin Becker argues that ‘media can turn a public event into a ritualized event’ (34). She argues that both private and public real-life events can be turned into a ‘performance space’ in that it turns the mundane into ritualized events in the sense of both private and public occurrences. In a sense sites like Twitter act as a vault of knowledge in that daily occurrences are now turned into a documented moment in history, except now rather than being written in a book where no one can personally respond to, this moment is up for public consumption with everyone ready to consume media. However, my biggest question to this would be what happens when something during our daily routine goes horribly, HORRIBLY wrong. 

 

Chances are many of you viewing this blog already know the context of this picture, but for those of you that don't, I'll give a brief explanation. This is Logan Paul, who has become somewhat of an internet celebrity over the past year; he originally started off as a Vine star, but after Vine collapsed transitioned to YouTube and now has over 17 million subscribers on the platform. Logan Paul was once a part of the 'daily vlogger' community (that is, he uploaded a video every day of him doing noteworthy things), although since has slowed down productions of his vlogs to a weekly basis. Earlier this year, however, he was involved in a scandal regarding the content of one of his daily vlogs.

While on vacation in Japan, Logan Paul and his cronies decided to go to Japan's Aokigahara Forest, a forest in Japan that is a notorious location in Japanese culture as a place where one goes to commit suicide, hence why it is referred to as the 'Suicide Forest'. It is illegal to enter the forest itself, but Logan Paul and his crew decided to go in anyways. When they began hiking through the forest, sure enough Logan Paul found a dead body and included the censored corpse in one of his daily vlogs. Sure enough, the internet took to social media in a storm and expressed outrage for what Logan Paul had done.  

This is where the conflict of "Private vs. Public" comes into play: Logan Paul had built his social media career off of sharing what happened in his day to day life into what I can only describe as a 'toxic ritualization of vlogging'. In my opinion, Logan Paul was always trying to 'one-up' himself in the sense that each day had to have something new and exciting to film in order to entertain his audience; one day, he decided to go into the suicide forest to see what he could find. When he found the dead body in the vlog, you can see him visibly flabbergasted and at a loss for words, but at the same time you know he couldn't have felt genuinely sorry because he went ahead and posted the video under the guise of it being for 'suicide awareness' when in reality, all it did was further his career by creating traffic to his channel. I feel as if the ritualization of media could have effected Logan's decision to upload the video, as he obviously didn't even think about the consequences of uploading it.

The 'Logan Paul disaster' could be an interesting topic to write the final paper of the class on. As we go further into the course, I'm hoping to find new methods of analyzing this situation in terms of examining how social media could've impacted Logan Paul's decision to go into the Suicide Forest.