Throughout the article, “The Irony of YouTube: Politicking Cool”, Jessie Blackburn critiques the YouTube video “5 Friends” of celebrities attempting to cause the younger generation to vote as well as spread the word about voting to their friends. The video “5 Friends” was published online right before the 2008 election would be taking place in November of that year. The reasoning behind why Blackburn is critiquing this video is because he wants to show how widespread this video actually was between those in the younger generation of voters at the time. His argument from his critique is that platforms like YouTube should be used to talk about politics with the youth. The community’s opinion is that the younger generation of voters are not involved with politics but Blackburn tries to demonstrate perhaps they have just not been spoken to in the right way to be more involved. Blackburn argues that the so called disengagement of youth voters has resulted from a lack of directing political conversation towards their generation in a way they can level with and understand.
Blackburn first establishes his connection to the subject he’ll be critiquing by addressing himself as part of the “YouTube generation”, another term used for describing the group youth, around ages 18 to 29, who keep up with politics through comedic television shows or online platforms that employ irony as a tactic to engage this younger audience. Blackburn uses Burke’s Pendatic Criticism method as the theoretical framework throughout his article to illustrate how the video works as a rhetorical artifact. While he does not necessarily establish that the method he is using is Burke’s Pentad, Blackburn does go through each point of the pentad to display the video’s influence over its targeted audience.
In short, Burke’s Pentad examines five aspects of a rhetorical artifact: act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. Blackburn performs this Pendatic Criticism by diving into each of these five aspects. As described earlier, he inspects the scene, when and where the artifact was done, by detailing the environment around which the video was made, in this case being during the 2008 election year. He looks at the act, or what was being done, as that of the act of the video addressing registering to vote and actually voting with the use of irony. He delves into talking about the sarcasm used in the video through pointing out particular dialogue such as, “who cares about global warming or the fact that…our polar ice caps are melting. I hear polar bears can swim! I forbid you to vote. Stay right where you are. Don’t vote!” The way Blackburn takes apart the dialogue in the video intrigued me as I felt he detailed the critical point of the common satiric language used to connect with the audience. With irony at its center, Blackburn displays the amount of influence this type of rhetorical artifact has on the youth voters as the target viewers.
The agents in this video are the celebrities which were used to make it. Blackburn states, “Relying implicitly on the high-profile, elite, celebrity status of the stars, the video speaks to the target audience through its use of familiar pop idols dressed like everyday, average citizens”. He addresses this agent aspect of the criticism particularly well with this statement as he explains how the use of a celebrity as the agent connects well with its intended audience. In order to look at agency, or how the video was done, he picks apart the video through discussing its visuals with the statement, “The video runs in and out of focus, suggesting something of a personal, home-video quality instead of its actual professional, production-studio quality”. Again, Blackburn establishes here the connection between the agents and audience of how the video was done. He explains that the video was made by a method which youth voters could identify with as well as make voting look ‘cool’ to them. Blackburn also describes the purpose of the video, or why it was done, to be that it is mainly to get people, most notably the younger generation, to register to vote, then actually vote, and convince others around them that voting is important. He illustrates that calling the audience out to perform an action can truly help influence them to follow through with said action.
This criticism works well as a form of rhetorical action as it connects and engages with the audience while at the same time critiquing the rhetorical artifact. Blackburn connects with his audience as he shows how well the artifact influences its target viewers on the topic of voting and uses this to argue to his viewers that more online platforms, such as YouTube, should be used to discuss politics with younger voters in a way which makes sense to them. I personally read this criticism with ease and found it extremely interesting to follow. Since I myself am part of the group of youth voters, I agreed with Blackburn that we, as a younger generation of voters, do not particularly care for the news television stations and would much rather engage with a program involving satire and irony or one that is witty and quick to the point. After reading Blackburn’s criticism, I found myself looking at the recent advances in the scattering of political information during the ten years following the release of the video “5 Friends”. It’s intriguing to see how today, the media uses many online platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and others to connect with youth voters on subjects involving politics. Blackburn’s method of Burke’s Pendatic Criticism works well in his critique to demonstrate the influence of certain platforms on a targeted audience of viewers.
From Blackburn’s rhetorical criticism, I learned that it is important to examine all parts of a rhetorical artifact when making an argument based off of it. I enjoyed the way Blackburn detailed quotes and visual aspects of the video to show how it all played a role in accomplishing its purpose of engaging youth voters to actually use their power to vote. I also think Blackburn’s argument of the reason for a lack in youth voters is because of a lack in communication with them was justified and perhaps his criticism of this video helped influence online platforms to resolve that lack in the distribution of political information as we now see it on many sites today. While the rhetorical artifact itself was targeted towards the younger generation of viewers, Blackburn’s criticism itself was aimed at an audience of all ages. I am sure of this because his artifact he examines would draw in a younger viewer while his arguments for methods needed to engage these viewers is aimed at those in the older generations because they, those in higher positions of power, are able to change the way politics is talked about with the youth voters. Those in the older voting pool needed to see that there was more than one way to distribute political information, which could clearly be demonstrated by the widespread views of the video “5 Friends” by the public. I would follow Blackburn’s critique fairly similarly, using Burke’s Pentad as my main outline for writing a criticism on an artifact such as the one described in Blackburn’s article. However, one thing I would do differently in a criticism like this would be to better establish the argument he is trying to make in his article. Although he addresses it, I feel that Blackburn could have gone into more detail of his argument for the need of more online platforms and television programs which use irony to connect with the youth voters. Overall, Blackburn’s article performs the method of Pendatic Criticism well and works to influence the audience at taking a second look at how the spread of discussion on politics with the youth voters should be approached.
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