Youtube & Shane Dawson: How Internet Culture Shifts

Youtube has been one of the largest platforms for content creation on social media for just over ten years, and the culture of it has changed drastically. The way that content has been curated on Youtube is directly affected by the viewers, and their engagement on said videos and creators are under pressure to fit into that ideal as it grows and changes. Shane Dawson has been uploading videos for about as long as Youtube has existed, and the content that he has put out over those years has reflected the culture shifts that the Youtube community has experienced. Shane has been a part of "canceled culture" many times during this period, where controversies have resulted in lash back from his audience.

In the very early years of Shane Dawson’s career on Youtube, his videos were geared towards a shock value style of comedy. The videos he created often included offensive humor, dark themes, and characters that were typically Shane himself dressed in drag. Shane Dawson had a fanbase of young teens, and his humor reflected that. Many of the jokes and comments that Shane made in his videos during this time have since landed him in a myriad of controversies, most of which didn't occur until the rise of "canceled culture" on Twitter, where controversial instances will be dug up and exposed to the public so that the person that made those comments is written off by their fanbase as "problematic".

Around 2014, Shane Dawson's videos became more about what was going to get the most views within the culture that Youtube had at that point in time. This meant that Shane was uploading videos six days a week that had very little effort put into them, most typically being on the topic of "DIY" or food-related videos that still contained his shock-value comedy that was his rise to fame in earlier years. Over time his content shifted from this style, into much higher production documentary-style series that focus on relevant pop culture issues such as TanaCon and major influencers like Jake Paul and Jeffree Star. These videos tend to be very long and in multiple parts. Shane makes these videos as a way to channel his desire to direct movies in the future.

The controversies Shane has been involved in have mostly stemmed from his past comments that were inappropriate and offensive. Some of the most infamous scandals have been comments he's made about little girls in a sexual manner that led to accusations of him being a pedophile, and comments he made regarding his cat in a sexual nature that caused people to believe he was committing bestiality.

Overall the way Youtube culture functions is that at any moment it could implode due to the sheer nature of the community of its users and creators. The nature of social media, in general, is chaotic and tends to be a matter of herd mentalities that could change at any moment. Overall the phenomenon that is Shane Dawson on Youtube has been wild from the beginning and will likely continue to be so.

Final Exam

2014:


With Robin Williams, passing in 2014 came splurge of social media attention. It was perceived as tragic that someone who had made others laugh, was in fact, depressed himself. I believe that 2014 was the year that social media began to positively transition from keyboard warriors and trolls, to a place that allowed more room for discussion.

Following his death, a lot of people took the opportunity to open the conversation about mental health. Celebrities themselves even used their status and platform to do this, normalizing mental health concern as well as reducing the stigma by talking about it.

This was a great time for social media, as it was a time where people began to be able to talk openly about their mental illnesses.

Personally, I felt that it was sad that he killed himself, but comforting in that it could be any one of us. Around this time, I was 14 and began to feel a bit off, and tried to open up with my parents and friends about my potential illnesses and struggles.



In 2014, #BlackLivesMatter began to grow as a movement. Two years prior, Trayvon Martin was unjustly murdered, then in 2014, Michael Brown was shot dead by those who are supposed to protect us. Again, discussion was opened up. Was racism in America really this bad? How do we stop it? And how many black and brown bodies have to pile up to get it to stop?

The spread of news and distraught began a movement that brought attention and awareness to racism that was previously (and currently, unfortunately) thought to “not exist”.

These conversations, about mental health and institutional/systematic racism, though uncomfortable, are important and are things that we can no longer ignore. With social media, it was made easier to bring attention to these issues faster, as well as a broader amount of people.

With these positive advancements, comes negative ones as well. Because news is spread faster and to a broader amount of people, counter cultures will always have a platform to be openly hateful and get attention.

In response to #BLM was #BlueLivesMatter (which in itself is ignorant because you choose to be a cop, you don’t choose to be black), essentially telling black people to shut up and quite there voices. The effects of counter culture caused some [more, perceived] racial tension in the US.

Siva Vaidhyanathan believes Trump won the election because of something similar to counter culture. Essentially, Facebook and other social media sites allow us to filter what we do and don’t want to see-- so we’re constantly surrounded by “yes men”.

You can see this idea within the #BLM vs #BlueLivesMatter discourse in 2014. Many people on both sides gained popularity, so it’s hard to get through to people and have their minds change if everyone else is telling them that their opinion is the right one.

Even amongst my friends, politics and mental health are uncomfortable topics to talk about because there is no room for neutrality or open mindedness.

While it was good in 2014 that serious topics began being discussed, the way that they’re discussed is not always civil, and takes away from that original good.




2019:




There is a lot of good, positive things that have happened on social media in 2019, but when trying to think of things to write about, I could only come up with the bad ones quickly.

To me, that means that not necessarily a lot of bad things are happening, but that they’re what gets pushed toward the forefront by popular culture.

This year had a lot of YouTuber drama, and was a “good” year for a whole lot of bad press. 2018 should have been a warning into what 2019 was going to become, considering Jake Paul’s suicide forest scandal, and Tana Mongeau's TanaCon scandal.

James Charles is a makeup YouTuber who just can’t catch a break. Admittedly, he is a jerk, but with the microscope social media users put him under, I imagine it’s hard not to be. One wrong move and everything goes to crap.

In 2019 alone, he’s publicly outed a straight man who rejected him, bullied two kids about not liking his (cheap) makeup palette, tried to charge 500$ for his “makeup tour” (wear really he just sang poorly and danced equally as poorly in front of an audience), and other things.

He is well known for tweeting and deleting, as well as sending his fans to hate on people. I believe having such a huge social media following in the first place is toxic within itself, as it promotes stan and cancel culture; really giving no one the opportunity to be able to redeem themselves, while at the same time creating a larger fanbase for those who don’t care and are now viewers themselves.

The promotion of cancel culture gives celebrities and personalities no room to grow.



Brother Nature wrote insensitive tweets years ago and was “exposed” for it. While we can all say that they were wrong, he was also around 13 years old when they were posted, and seems like a relatively nice guy now.




I myself was a rather awful teenager, and if someone pulled up my tweets from 5 years ago, they’d find ignorant things as well. Does this mean I should fear for my reputation and image- even though I was 15? Cancelling someone for things they said when they were young is toxic as they are no longer that person. Recent scandals, or even being racist 5 years ago and still being an adult, may be a reason to “cancel” someone; to cancel them in the now instead of for who they used to be, with no room for apologizing or change.




As for the good, I really like that social media comes with free education and awareness. As of late, #TrashTag has influenced people to go pick up trash/litter and prevent pollution, because we’re now aware far more about what we are doing to our planet.




https://twitter.com/decolonialatlas/status/1122495059394465792



Because of twitter, actually, I became far more aware of the state of our planet. I try to minimize my consumption of plastics and shop more ethically. It is hard to do, but it’s harder to imagine a future where we may not be able to safely walk outside.

Lee Humphrey’s “identity work” may apply in this case. While it may seem narcissistic to some to “pretend” to be an environmentalist and perform the act of picking up trash/spreading awareness, I actually think this is a positive thing.

Regardless of the intention of the person doing #TrashTag, they’re still picking up the trash, and therefore helping save the earth. So, even “pretending” to be a woke environmentalist for social media ends up being a really good thing. By spreading awareness with a large enough platform, surely there are some people (like me) who it would really resonate with.


2024:


In 2024, I think that people will become more aware and insecure in their self image and try to keep it as clean as possible. The Looking Glass Self is the concept that you behave how you imagine others view you; but with social media, people tell you how they view you. Whether it be behavioral (amount of likes, dislikes, etc) or in the comments.

With the popularity of FaceTune or Snapchat filters, it’s becoming normal to not look like yourself in photos. Being told that you look ugly without makeup on, or not complemented enough on your body when it isn’t photoshopped, will become increasingly harmful if we don’t do something about it.

But this could, in the future, easily be the good if we do take the right steps. Many people on social media are already refusing to edit their bodies, or show their “real” selves; exposing how lighting, angles, and poses can easily hide imperfections.

[ Ex 1: A woman who had children is still fit, but has loose skin and stretch marks. She shows herself flexing to hide that. ]

[Ex 2: Lady Gaga doesn’t have perfectly perky breasts, and she has stretch marks on them as well.]


[Ex 3: Explained in image].

By adding realism to social media, I think that in the future we can reduce dysmorphia and begin to accept our bodies as they are without plastic surgery or photoshopping. I myself try to take pictures without filters, so that when I look back at them I know what I "really" look like.

In the future, I think social media will be more good than bad, as more people begin to become aware and become a better version of themselves, or at least the “healthy” version of themselves that they think people want to perceive them as. We are already changing our environment for the better, I can see us as a society in the future changing our standards of beauty and our levels of toxicity.

Social Media through the Years Final

I want to note that this is also typed up and found on my "Scholarly blog" which you can find here. I just thought that it would help having it here as well.

Social media has been readily evolving for years now its something that has been part of our lives for a very long time, for the past decade to be exact. There’s been moments in which we’d hate social media,  that its evil and that people can use it for evil and that it will get the better of us one day, now some of that may hold true, there’s positives and negatives to social medias impact on our everyday lives and that’s what I want to discuss today, to dig down on the importance of social media and its impact it’s had in the past, the present and the future to come, narrowing it more down from 2014 , 2019 and 2024. While it’s a long time off in 2024 its fine to talk about such things given how things are like now in 2019 and how they’d look in 2024.  

For the most part I feel as though back in the early days of 2014 we’d all agree that most of us weren’t even on social media or even knew what it was, that’s not to say it didn’t exist but it was present in my life that’s for sure, back in 2014 it was the peak of social media usage, everyone was on Facebook, Tumblr and even Twitter, it was a nonstop craze , a be there or be square kind of thing. Everyone wanted a part of social media and what better than to hop on your computer and make that Facebook account your grandpa has been begging you to make, this was the time in which it was so relevant, based on a research conducted by Pew Research Center back in 2015. I think also other than 2012 being a big moment in social media all in itself since it was mostly the time, I remember it being so big. But back to 2014, there are some positives here, obviously that being that social media has brought us together family and friends alike, everyone had a Facebook account and it was a cesspool of a bunch of people in one website interacting and exchanging hellos and what not, but with a good thing comes a bad thing, now that there was a big website dominating the social media scene it called for all reaches of life to come into contact with it, from differently politically aligned, and even the worse of all, pta moms. There were exchanges and full out fights in comments of photos and posts about all sorts of things, Jan was arguing with the school bully from her kindergarten class but at the same time posting minion memes during her time where she wasn’t having a feud online over what color to put on her daughter's wedding photos, that’s just how things were back in 2014 and I kind of wish we could go back to that time. While it was the peak of internet usage it was simpler, there were no self-proclaimed social media influencers scandals from internet celebrates because their stance on something is widely different than yours. Not to say it didn’t happen! I’m sure it did but it’s just so crazy to think that social media expanded so largely in that span of 5 years from then on to here, so much has changed, from websites changing their layouts, to moving to an app to then soon on big money soulless corporations pretending they understand memes in a creepy ystopian kind of way to get people to buy their products because they know how to execute a meme correctly on Twitter. In 2014 there were a lot of things that went down and one of them thinking MySpace and Google+ would flourish, also that’s not even to mention that one of the prominent thing that was ever created and a major factor of most of our childhoods, or lack of a better term, teen hoods, were revolved around a great creation of its time and that was Vine, a short video app that connected us all through 7 second videos about all sorts of things. 2014 was an era all of its own with the rapid use of social media and the impact of it being in our lives.  

Next up is what social media is now in the year of 2019, and while it’s not over yet it certainly has done a lot with it only being May right now. This year and the year before, as I’ve mentioned above, has been the introduction and rise of social media influencers and people who think YouTube is a real job,  I find it amazing that social media has gone so far from 2014 till now that it has grown so widely that people can now be internet celebrities hosting their own events, like James Charles, despite doing nothing remotely remarkable other than knowing how to put on some killer makeup. That’s just social media’s impact from now. It’s odd though I’ve noticed so much from my time growing up with social media all around me that. Social Media has a way of influencing people more than ever now be it from makeup trends and memes that could end up with you prison and what not. Since Social media is so easily assessable people are more likely to fall for the same old misleading techniques but now with such great fervor. 

It's also worth mentioning that while there has been great leaps in social media usage in 2019, like how there are many uses for social media such as online petitions for change, GoFundMe's exceeding expectations, having millions of stories become public, things like that but I find that things such as those are some of the positives for social media but at the same time one of the cons of it as well. Social media has the tendency to attract a large crowd of all kinds of people, much like how people can use things that are rather good to get funding and positive people to listen to you it has a habit of working for rather sketchy people’s gains. There will always be 1 article of GoFundMe’s becoming a scam out of 3 that are legit, along with people becoming famous on social media becoming obsessed with stardom which leads to their downfall in some cases. And as much as 2019’s has passed by the more and more this has come prevalent. I find as though it is an admirable feat to become famous online its also easy for scummy people to end up famous as well and be revealed to be just as such as soon as they reach their peak, like how in recent news a famous youtuber was found guilty of having child pornography and they weren’t the only ones accused of recently that had such things. I find one of social medias greatest downfalls other than becoming a cesspool of corruption in the past year I find that since its so easily accessible there's a chance that minors can get into trouble with it, and that's  no secret either, there has been several cases of which a preteen was actually talking to some old man catfish in his 40’s, does “To Catch a Predator” sound familiar? The rise of social media has made this just that much easier, with children being able to have easy access to large user bases such as Facebook and Twitter they will run into such people easily. It makes me fear for the future, the more accessible this media becomes the larger chances things like this will happen. which leads me to my next topic, the future, 2024 to be exact.  

And while this is only 5 years off there so much that can happen in just the span of 5 years. And as you’ve noticed from the shift from 2014 and 2019 and how much more expansive social media has become the same can be expected here. Over the course of five years a whole lot can happen, be it more jobs can be found online, journalism and streaming sites will be used more than before, replacing the days old times of DVD’s, not that they haven’t already but the span of five years is a lot to think about given all that can happen in such short time. I feel as though one of the good things that might come out of this is that employers will become more open to hiring people online than ever before, that there will be more jobs online like I said before but what the true main focus here is what can we see in social media 5 years from now. Thinking about the future is a big deal, and given how much social media has changed ALREADY I find that maybe the trends that are popular right now aren’t going to be so hot in the future, I’m talking social media “influencers” and the like, I feel like that’s a trend already on its last leg and filled with controversies. I think the only time social media has become a powerful tool is when it was given the platform for people to claim themselves as influencers and tell you how to run your life. That trend seems to be dying out even now and I can’t help but feel that apps like Snapchat and Instagram are already reaching their relevancy lifespan, that’s not to say that they will just drop off the face of the earth I just find that those apps that center around body image and people isn’t going to be so popular in the future, maybe I’m wrong and it will become more popular, only time will tell.  I truly believe that when people started making serious money over doing minimal work and showing off their expensive homes that they bought through ad revenue was truly when we as a society have collapsed. Because of people like that others believe they can do the same, and there's nothing wrong with that just that it’s a pipedream if anything that just doesn’t seem so idealistic if you take into account how people like that got famous in the first place. I just hope in the future people start to believe that how many favorites, likes or views, and followers they have does NOT determine their worth, that it's okay to use social media without wanting to die into the trend that if you have less than 100 followers on any social media platform you are worthless and a nobody, which simply is not true, social media should never have become a competition to see who can get the more likes or followers, if anything it should have been a platform anyone could use to connect to old friends and share photos without vying for attention of strangers. We’ve honestly evolved from independent people to court jesters doing the most out of wack things to get a laugh out of a king, and that’s no joke, people will do almost to anything to get a like or view on their personal posts its almost crazy how desperate some people can get for these sort of things. Social Media should revert back to be a source to spread stories and meet new people, old friend and family, share funny cat videos and laugh at bad memes like it was years ago.  

Social Media has made a great impression on everyone for how big it has gotten in this day and time, and while it has done the things that I mentioned above has joined many people together, brought love and made old connections come back again after so long. Social Media has the power to be a good thing for society given how large it can be, we can express ourselves freely there and form new bonds with strangers all around the world, and this can be a good and bad thing for many reasons, and while social media has let us form new bonds it has also closed us off from the real world, and I don’t mean to sound like a old man but people don’t stop to smell the roses and get to know their neighbor anymore like we used to, even I’m guilty of that. We focus so much on the things going on online that we forget to step back and relish in the life we have right now.  

So, to end things off finally I just want to say that social media has made huge leaps in humans connecting worldwide on a large scale, letting news transfer faster than ever before, we can discuss anything we want freely, given that it isn’t anything bad obviously, and get our messages across to anyone willing to listen. While bad things have happened with the advancement of media online, we can't deny that it has done so much to change society as a whole be it with how anyone can use it and small businesses can be easily recognized and found, artists can share their artwork to a huge audience and petitions can be signed, and fundraisers can be fully funded. People form communities online, we can talk to our grandmothers while we game, not that I would recommend it but we can do it! Social Media has evolved from where it started all the way back in time to what it is now, and it's still evolving, it's something we should keep an eye on because of so much that can happen on it, While some may look down on it social media with its good and bad things, can help shape society more than we can without it whether we want it to or not.