King Kriggle Post class (Jenkins 3/16/10)

For this post class blog I began thinking about the comparisons Jenkins had been making to spoofs such as Starr Wars and other popular videos that had since gone “viral” and about how websites like youtube have only made these possibilities seem even more endless. The one that comes to mind to me the easiest and most clear would be the pornographic spoof that was made most recently by Hustler on Sarah Palin. It was entitled Who’s Nailin’ Paylin. It starred a woman that was previously unknown but looked a good deal like Sarah Palin and during the most recent elections it made them a hit overnight. They came out with an original in which she was involved with Russians that had crashed a tank in her back yard. To say the least they made her not only look stupid but they made her look completely subservient to men as well drawing a sexist conclusion in there as well. Then they made other videos in which she was intimately involved with Hilary Clinton as well as Condoleza Rice (sorry if i spelled the name wrong) all of which were an overnight sensation. Thinking back to Jenkins it is amazing how videos like this take our minds off of the topic at hand and distract us from the real issue at hand. In this case it was a woman running for vice president. In the cases mentioned by Jenkins it took our minds off of the sexual acts and lies that had been done by former president Bill Clinton. Tons of other videos have followed in on the coat tails of important real world issues. Parodies are not exactly a bad thing as I enjoy them as much as the next man, but when something like this is allowed to proliferate our society it turns the entire issue at hand into a joke. Instead of thinking about the fact that our president lied to us or a woman is running for vice president, we are all too often reminded of the funny parody that we saw. So in essence this is another way i think Jenkins was talking about participatory culture, instead of thinking for ourselves and remembering what the issue really is we participate in the mockery and let the entire thing go unnoticed. “Too often, fan appropriation and transformation of media content gets marginalized or exoticized, treated as something people do when they have too much time on their hands” (Jenkins pg 551).