Title
YouTube Pranking Across Cultures
Document Type
Article
Date of Original Version
7-6-2015
Department
Communication Studies
Abstract
Online pranking videos are common online and popular among middle-school students, teens and young adults. When we examined 200 YouTube examples of the Scary Maze Game prank, we explored the relationship between perpetrator, victim and witness, finding that while American children under age 12 were commonly featured as victims in Scary Maze Game prank videos, only rarely were German children represented as victims. U.S. videos also lingered on the pain of prank victims, even looping the emotional response of the victim to create an instant replay effect and using post-production techniques, including editing, music and title credits. As an expression of the schadenfreude that people experience when both enacting and viewing bad pranks, online pranking is a dimension of the dark side of participatory culture.
Citation/Publisher Attribution
Hobbs, Renee and Silke Grafe. "YouTube Pranking Across Cultures." First Monday, vol. 20, no. 7, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v20i7.5981.
Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v20i7.5981
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication 1.0 License.
Publisher Statement
This paper is in the Public Domain.