In “Young People, Ethics, and the New Digital Media,” the authors writing the paper explored the “ways in which youth may be redefining identity, privacy, ownership, credibility, & participation as they engage with the new digital media” (James, et. al). This article was especially interesting to me because of something that happened to me just today.
It’s a fairly well-known fact that my evenings are usually rounded out by a few hours spent playing Xbox Live, usually the games Halo 3 or Left 4 Dead. Well, I only got my Xbox membership in March, and I played for a few hours before immediately meeting someone on there who has become a very close friend of mine- Matt. Matt and I met in a game of Left 4 Dead, and he got me into Halo 3 around the beginning of the summer.
I had trouble learning Halo, because the setup of the buttons and triggers is more complex than Left 4 Dead. To help me figure it out, Matt recommended I watch some YouTube videos he liked by an Xbox Live user named Phurion.
I watched them, and they were essentially pretty awesome gameplay videos, showcasing some of the most brilliant and amazing kills I’d ever seen. I quickly favorited him on YouTube, so I’d get updates when he posted new video montages.
More recently, I got a Twitter. When watching the latest Phurion installment, I saw in the sidebar that he, too, had a Twitter and was looking for followers. Click! Added.
The next day, I got an email saying that he was following me on Twitter, too. Turns out, he’s actually a very down-to-earth guy from Seattle who just happens to be really good at gaming (so he’s already using the new media interface with the gaming element). He used his talent and channeled it into creating YouTube videos (also new media, but now, like this study, we’re confronting the problem of ownership online because the montages are created from his gameplay), and then finally got a Twitter.
The odd thing is, because of his amazing talent, he’s something of a celebrity online and on Xbox Live, something which has seriously taken away from his privacy (see the article). He gets queries daily as to how to make montages like his and challenges from people who want to play him in one on one matches, etc.
Long story a bit shorter, I posted a tweet last night after a rather depressing experience on Halo 3 (my kill/death spread hovered around 0 and, on my worse games, -2. This is really bad because you want this number to be positive, so you will be helping your team rather than being a hindrance). This morning I checked my Twitter to find a message from Phurion asking for my gamertag so we could be friends on Live.
Hopefully he’ll make me better at Halo. I could definitely use the pointers. If nothing else, I have a feeling that my teams will lose less with him on them.
New media is a funny thing. In a few months, I’d gone from never having heard of Phurion to revering his videos and awesome skill to having him as one of my friends on Xbox. I suppose the reason I felt like sharing this story is that online celebrity is such an odd and fickle thing. New media shapes people into these personalities online that really aren’t who they are, or are maybe only a portion of who they are. If it weren’t for Phurion’s complete mastery of new media, he certainly wouldn’t have that complete other online personality– maybe his friendships would be different. Maybe he’d only have a select few on his Xbox Live friends list, instead of having to delete someone in order to add me.
Maybe.