The talk show uploaded: YouTube and the technicity of the body

Abstract

The dramatic success of YouTube and related internet sites in recent years has led to a shift in public interaction with many television programs, including popular and controversial television talk shows, such as Peruvian Laura Bozzo's Laura en América. While television talk shows and other media have long participated in the production and circulation of racial, national, and class-based stereotyped images, the interplay between television, YouTube and independent internet use allows for new modes of engagement between embodied subjects and digital images. Through analysis of uploaded clips of Laura Bozzo's show, homemade videos and user commentary, this article addresses changes and continuities in the structure of interpellation, through which identities circulate via popular Spanish language internet media. Building upon recent work by Mark Hansen regarding corporeal technicity, the article suggests that contemporary internet use blurs the contours of the stereotyped media image, and harnesses the user into a complex dynamic of both virtual and embodied identity delineation.

Keywords:

• YouTube
• Laura Bozzo
• talk show
• internet
• Perú
• mixed reality
• technicity
• racial identity
• national identity
• corporeality
• embodiment

Notes

1. Laura was placed under house arrest in 2002 for an alleged financial corruption scheme involving Vladimiro Montesinos, former aide to President Fujimori (Gotkine, 2003) and in 2006 was found guilty of embezzlement (Segura, 2006). The suggestion that Bozzo's show actually served Fujimori's political aims (Gotkine, 2003) further links her work to the former president's orchestrated populism, and to his violent regime.

2. As Ben Fritz and Michael Learmonth write, ‘Many studios, labels and diskeries are busy taking full advantage of the ever growing promotional power of YouTube, particularly among the younger 18–24 demo, and are actually pushing the Netco to offer them more advertising options’ (2007, para. 8). Also see ‘Viacom will sue YouTube for $1bn’ (2007), and ‘About YouTube’ (2007).

3. As Harvey Blume writes, in reference to freak show spectacles: ‘The genres it was most crucial for Barnum to confound were those of fact and fiction, or, more specifically, science and showmanship’ (1999, p. 191).