NOTES: Origins and Context | See Also
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Origins of this content
This is condensed from a 2008 blog where I interact online with new media scholar and pundit Howard Rheingold, criticizing his euphoric read of vernacular video. If you play both videos at once, Deliverance provides a catchy back-beat for my critical reading.
Contextualization
Vernacular video, according to Tom Sherman, "will continue to be shorter and shorter," will use "canned music," "sampling," and "real-time, on-the-fly voiceovers." He concludes: "Crude is cool, as opposed to slick."[cit]

Deliverance was "adapted from James Dickey's popular novel. John Boorman's 1972 movie recounts the grueling psychological and physical journey taken by four city slickers down a river in the backwoods of Georgia ... After warnings from the grimy, impoverished locals, and Drew's tuneful yet ominous Dueling Banjos encounter with a mute inbred boy, the four men embark on their trip ... As the river gets rougher and rougher, the men come to nightmarish grips with what it means to survive outside the safety net of 'civilization.'"[cit]

Cyber studies is often bifurcated by a euphoria/pessimism divide focusing on questions like whether the Internet opens or closes conversation and community, is democratic or corporate-controlled particularly around issues of copyright and intellectual property, and produces new forums for expression or calcifies prevailing borders as well as establishing possibilities for surveillance.

"If this is what happens to a left-winger who is actually succeeding in taking the struggle to the centre ground of British life, why would anyone want to follow him into the mainstream? Is the only way to avoid this drip-feed of abuse to remain in a position of impotent marginality?"

"The Vampires' Castle specialises in propagating guilt. It is driven by a priest's desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant's desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster's desire to be one of the in-crowd." [cit]

We can apply Mark Fischer's rhetorical concept of 'The Vampires Castle" to the other online structure whereby 'being normie'/identifying with what is popular exposes you to ridicule, and the boundaries of 'being niche' are patrolled just as heavily. The people on the outside of them are just as vulnerable to the 'drip feed of abuse' that comes from either a alignment with what is 'popular/normie', or the literal limelight/target that comes with being 'twitter guy of the day'. These constructs of popularity rub up against the fault lines of entrenched online communities through the construct of the vampires castle, with the variables being objects identified with virtue.
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More videos related to the content of this page
DUELING BANJOS

Where boosters (like Rheingold) see roses, snarks like me see thorns.