Killer Entertainments

Jennifer Terry and Raegan Kelly, Vectors Journal, and University of Southern California Institute for Multimedia Literacy

http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/5/killerentertainments/index.php

Killer Entertainments displays 33 viral videos of military actions in the War on Terror shared between three viewing windows. In order to generate micro-narratives on political and economic dialogue, military activities, real persons, places, and video strategies, points of concern are taken from the recordings. By creating a network of common themes to stimulate discussion about the war, the project attempts to contextualize the videos. In addition to scholarly printing, references are obtained from numerous film, news, and government websites.
In order to explore what the project has to offer, visitors are encouraged to actively participate. Visitors acquire information from interactions through the mix of music, voice, and visual interactive structures. Be it terror, panic, excitement, adrenaline and calm, the raw video captures the full spectrum of human emotions. Viral videos encourage the viewer to bear witness through the sights caught on film and the sounds of gunfire, orders and profanity to war at it's most real form. The videos chosen for review are intentionally transient in nature and can be found on any variety of popular video sharing sites.

Access to the internet

This source is unique in its structure. Videos used on this site are taken from popular video sharing platforms so they can be found outside of this source but feelings raised during the presentation are not achievable while simply watching videos.

It would be hard to use this source for a research project due to its content being mostly visual.