Here are my sources for my latest blog post about Logan Paul:
Works Cited Cook, Jesselyn. “1 Year After His Infamous 'Suicide Forest' Video, Logan Paul Is Bigger Than Ever.” HuffPost, HuffPost, 9 Jan. 2019, www.huffpost.com/entry/logan-paul-1-year-suicide-forest_n_5c2e9b92e4b05c88b70798f5. Koerber, Brian. “Logan Paul Wishes His Fans Were Older. They're Not.” Mashable, Mashable, 1 Feb. 2018, mashable.com/2018/02/01/logan-paul-young-fans-demograpphic/. Ronson, Jon. So You've Been Publicly Shamed. Picador, 2016. Paul, Logan. “Logan Paul.” YouTube, YouTube, www.youtube.com/channel/UCG8rbF3g2AMX70yOd8vqIZg.
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Some things should not be made public. If we haven’t learned that already from Jon Ronson’s book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, we may be able to learn such from famous Youtuber and influencer, Logan Paul. He describes himself in his YouTube bio as a “24-year-old kid in Hollywood making crazy daily Vlogs!”
Logan got himself into a slew of trouble after vlogging in a Japanese forest where he panned the camera over to a suicide victim hanging from a tree. As stated in a HuffPost article, Logan walked up to the body with his friends laughing, saying things like “Yo, are you alive? Are you f*cking with us?” (Cook). Logan’s first vlog, appropriately titled, “MY FIRST VLOG,” was published 3 years ago. Since then, Logan has built up a following of a fairly young demographic. He is wildly recognized as an entertainer for children currently and that’s what I personally knew him (and unfortunately, still do know him) as. A Mashable article describes Logan’s interview on Good Morning America where interviewer Michael Stahan asks Logan if he “realizes the age of [his] audience,” adding that “his own kids know the vlogger,” (Koerber). Even if Logan Paul’s audience were older, the content her put out when he published that vlog was wildly inappropriate and insensitive. What upset people most about the vlog was the fact that he does have a fairly young audience demographic. Children and young adults are impressionable and without a doubt look up to Logan as a role model. The message he sends out to his audience is anything but admirable, though, even aside from this one specific instance. Scrolling through Logan’s video section of his YouTube channel, it’s clear to see that he is not catering to a young audience whatsoever. His video’s thumbnails include images of pouring alcohol into the mouth of a half-naked woman, multiple images of Logan shirtless, some of him next to barely clothed women, and even some of him sniffing undisclosed substances with his eyes rolled back in his head as if he’s doing drugs. Though Logan posted that horridly scarring video of a victim’s body hanging from a tree, he has clearly made a major comeback. He recently even fought against another Youtuber, KSI, which was a widely covered event by sites like CBS Sports, Entertainment Tonight, and the Washington Post. So, where and when did Logan comeback? Even after 750,000 people signed varying petitions to remove him from YouTube entirely, Logan posted an apology video that seemingly magically reversed his initial exile. The video, merely titled “So Sorry.” Was posted on January 8th, 2018, just a few days after his initial video’s posting. The comments on this video are mostly jokes about how weak Logan is, especially in relation to his recent fight. This YouTube horror story relates closely to the story outlined in chapter 6 of Ronson’s novel, titled “Doing Something Good.” In this chapter, Ronson tells Adria Richards’ story of a tweet she posted exposing two men sitting behind her at a work conference who made a joke about “forking repo’s in a sexual way and ‘big’ dongles” (Ronson 114). The men identified in the picture Adria posted were reprimanded, one was even immediately fired from his job (116). The similarities between Logan Paul’s video and Adria Richard’s tweet exposing the men lie in the fact that these jokes and comments could have gone undetected had nobody published them. The fact that the men were exposed in both platforms is what led to their downfall. My hope for the world is that people think very carefully about what they post in such a public and exposed world. We must learn from the people who embarrass themselves by acting insensitively on a public platform and we must be better than how these people have acted. |
AuthorHello! My name is KD and I am a Junior at Belmont University. I have created this blog for my Digital Literacy class. Archives
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