From Mao Zedong to Michael Jackson: Revisualizing culture and history in the YouTube age

Abstract

There is an array of mash-up videos on YouTube, and its Chinese equivalent Tudou, that use visual footage from a Cultural Revolution performance with pop music soundtracks ranging from Michael Jackson's 'Beat It' to the rap song 'Ninja' by Jay Chou, a Taiwanese Mandopop star. In merging temporal and regional sights and sounds in this manner, these videos playfully remap history and the contemporary moment. At first glance the commentary posted to these videos seems like little more than unreflexive praise or unrelated venting. Yet comparing the conversations that take place on YouTube and Tudou reveals a good deal about the cultural and historical understandings of the people making the comments. In the following pages I will analyse these mash-ups and their posted commentary on YouTube and Tudou. In combination they create a dialogue that frequently aligns with regionally bound understandings of culture, politics, and history, even as they undermine that sense of local unity with their dissent. The Chinese-language videos and posted commentary also work to undermine commonly held assumptions that YouTube is a Western domain, forcing us to question our views of cultural centres and peripheries, both globally and in Chinese-speaking Asia.In a YouTube video posted by aerialpc, the sounds of Michael Jackson's pop hit 'Beat It' 1 are combined with visual footage from a Chinese Cultural Revolution performance for comedic effect. 2 In this mash-up, the lead performer no longer sings of the greatness of Mao Zedong but, rather, seems to extol the virtues of beating it. The hyperactive

Language and the Newness of Media

“…In short, it can be precisely the ways in which a new medium can seem to establish presence in the already established terms of previously used media that determine when telepresence is seen as contiguous with offline life (Ito & Okabe 2005, p. 8). At its heart, remediation is fundamentally about coordinating people's chronotopic experiences of media, interweaving how people construct time-space relationships around media that produce shared understandings of oldness, newness, and nostalgia (Acland 2006, Fisher 2016, Moskowitz 2015, Vokes & Pype 2016.…”