Reflection

My personal goal as a creator is to be recognized for things like technical skill, artistic sense, nice aesthetics, etc. Basically, I want to be recognized for my own work. Even if that work draws upon past influences, or even actively seeks to emulate an existing one, I want it to be stuff that I can still personally consider my "own". So it's difficult to be asked to create something that basically uses other people's works without altering it very much. It does take a lot of time and effort to create a good AMV, and that's very respectable, but it's not really something I want to do in life, although this was a definitely a good practice in video editing.

I also feel that it's extremely hard to "engineer" something that goes viral when it's not original content. I think that if it doesn't capitalize off existing things (i.e. an instance of a meme), then it either has to be really skillful (i.e. a very well-done AMV or supercut) or really thought provoking (I can't think of an example for this. If I were able to come up with a really interesting, provocative topic, then wouldn't I have done that instead?). Or else perhaps it's just clickbait. When it comes to memes especially, I think that most of the time they become popular by coincidence and not by the will of the original content creator, so even if you "study memes" in an academic way, you'd really need an insider's perspective of Internet humor in order to actually make a new meme and have it be successful. 

I guess what I'm saying is that -- what I learned is, while it's not beyond human control to have content go extremely viral, given the content and time constraints of this assignment, it certainly feels like it's a bit beyond mine!