My name is Michael Stewart, technically I'm a Brain, Behavior, and Cognitive Sciences major but my long term goal is to get into dental school. I'm taking this class primarily because I needed another credit, but also because I carefully looked through all of the possibilities of half-semester courses and this one stood out way, way above the rest. The course description was calling me, speaking my language, a familiar tongue in a sea of foreign tongues. Viral videos are an interesting phenomenon, I look at it in the same way that most people would view the movie box offices or the top 10 most popular music videos countdown. And what an appropriate name, viral videos, because they do in-a-way behave like viruses, which are cool in and of themselves. YouTube definately helped the art of viral video phenomenon explode. I love YouTube, I stumbled upon it during the Summer of '05 while looking for a website that I could upload a video to. I was looking for one that I didnt have to sign up for, so I passed it up. However, it did stand out above the rest of the video uploading sites that I found due to it's non-cluttered, easy-to-use interface, with videos uploaded in Flash so that codec issues were never a problem for people who couldnt view your video, so it wasnt a shock to see it explode like it did in the subsequent months and years.

More about me, things I enjoy doing include religiously checking my favorite sites (YouTube, Wikipedia, Digg, Kotaku, Engadget), blogging on Xanga.com, reading webcomics (Cyanide and Happiness happens to be my favorite), listening to Pandora online radio, playing computer games, building/fixing computers, all that good stuff. Unfortunately, school doesnt leave alot of time for these things, so I'm forced to step outside into the hot, blinding sunlight which burns my pasty blank-as-paste nerd skin. Out in "real life", I enjoy 'chilling with my homedogs', being active in events and political/social issues that I care about alot (Hash Bash '09 anyone?), watching way too many movies, and eating healthy.

Anyways, this is not by far my favorite viral video, but it's probably the most SFW one. It's security camera footage of a man who is stuck on an elevator for 41 hours. It's a particularly interesting video to me for many reasons. The production quality is good, simple and to the point, the music that they chose for the video and the speed at which it was played gets the point across while getting straight to the point while taking up less than 3 minutes of the viewer's time. It's also an important psychological resource. In the cold, small elevator with bright lights, he felt the need to keep the alarm on in hopes of someone hearing it, he began to have aural hallucinations, and he began praying although he was non-religious.



Moreso than the video itself that is interesting is the story that we dont see on camera. Part of the reason that some YouTube videos become popular may not be because of the video itself, but is instead about the story surrounding the video. From what I understand, after the experience he took an 8 week vacation without his employer's permission and they fired him from his job, where he had worked for 15 years. During the next 4 years, he fought in court to sue them for 25 million but ended up having to settle on a "hardly six figures" number. He lost all contact with his former colleagues, and his girlfriend left him. He lost his apartment, spent all his money, and searched, mostly in vain, for paying work. Last I checked, he was still unemployed.