For the first blog entry out of our textbook I choose the following question:
"Make a critical case either defending or condemning Comedy Central's South Park."
First off, I am a huge fan of the show South Park for both its portrayal of popular culture, and because it is plain ridiculous.
For those of you who don't know, South Park is about a group of four young boys from South Park Colorado who go about their day to day life. Except that their day to day life usually contains things such as being literally sucked into Facebook, dead celebrities possessing one of their brothers, an invasion of people from New Jersey into their town, and other equally crazy things. The show has been under scrutiny almost since it was released considering it includes themes such as adult language, strong sexual content, and extreme violence. More recently the show has gone to a more pop-culture-parody way of presenting itself and these episodes have caused just as much if not more bad attention from the press. However, beneath all of the vulgar language and violence is a show that can show the current pop-culture in ways that are both funny and smart, often saying things that no one else would dare to. It is because of this that I am going to defend South Park, or more specifically a recent episode, so people can realize that South Park is more than meets the eye.
I will be analyzing the episode "You have 0 Friends" from Season 14.
Description: This episode focuses on the social networking site Facebook, and how so many people have become addicted to both Facebook itself and the games that are on it. This episode focuses mostly on one of the four main characters Stan, who has refused to sign up and become a part of Facebook even though virtually everyone he knows has made an account. The main conflict of this episode is that everyone that Stan knows is pressuring him to get a Facebook account so they can add him to their friends list, or use him to visit their virtual farms, to which Stan declines time after time. It is only until his best friend Kyle comes to his house crying about how he only has one friend on Facebook that Stan agrees to make an account and become his friend.
Analysis: There are a large number of patterns in this episode; obviously they mostly focus on how Facebook sucks you in as evidenced by Stan and his Facebook page. Even though he made an account just to befriend Kyle, all of his other friends and even his relatives begin to question "How come you aren't my friend on Facebook? I thought we were actually friends/related". Later on Stan even gets yelled at by strangers when he didn't accept their friend requests. Which of course points to the people on Facebook who have hundreds of friends, many of them they haven't actually ever met. Some other noteworthy culture mentions would be another main character, Eric Cartman's performance on his Facebook based podcast Mad Friends in which he points out important Facebook facts such as, who has a Birthday coming up? Add them as friends to get invited to the party! Which kids have been growing in friend popularity lately? Make sure to add them to become popular! This podcast that he does is a reference to the financial show Mad Money on CNBC hosted by Jim Cramer. Another pop-culture reference is found towards the end of the episode; Stan has unwillingly become the person with the most friends on Facebook, and after being bothered every few seconds by people who want him to visit their profile he decides to delete his account. However, when he tries to he discovers that he cannot, and that his Facebook account has become self aware and won't let him destroy all that they have worked for. Stan then gets literally "sucked into Facebook" and must compete against his profile in a game of Yahtzee in order to escape. These scenes draw heavily from the movie "Tron", which is about a man who gets sucked into the virtual world. The characters and programs have very similar mannerisms and even clothing to the characters from the movie.
Interpretation: What South Park does really well is make most of it's cultural references easy to understand for the general audience, which is part of the reason why South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone get a lot of flak for the show itself, if they can create a controversial episode and everyone can see that it's controversial then obviously people will complain. This particular episode really highlights the general culture's addiction to Facebook. The characters on the show appear oftentimes distraught or hurt when they either lose friends, or someone won't add them as a friend. This is relating to how so many people on Facebook, and even MySpace before it, wanted to have friends for the sake of their friends list rising to huge numbers. To them it wasn't about who was their friend, but rather how many friends they actually had. This episode points to the concern that people also have over Facebook games, particularly games such as Farmville. The characters would brag about how great their "farm" was doing and would ask others to go check on their farm as well to make it better. There are currently over 63 million people who play the real Farmville on FacebookFacebook be very similar to the movie. By that I mean that there are virtual versions of everyone who has a Facebook account, and Stan watches them "socialize" by commenting on each others pictures, visiting each others farms, and both "liking" and "poking" each other. This is mocking the communication style that many people have today, especially on Facebook. Many people don't even talk in complete sentences to one another, and very rarely do I go on Facebook and see proper grammar, or even close to proper grammar. We as people have gotten to communicating through 150 words or less, or through status's and "pokes", and the "Tron" scenes show this off perfectly.
Evaluation: It's clear by now that I thoroughly enjoyed this episode. I am both a fan and a critic of Facebook and I was laughing out loud at some of the comparisons, concerns, and problems that Facebook has created for us in today's society. This episode took something that is huge right now, not just with pop-culture but just a massive part of our culture as a whole and was able to make fun of it in a way that everyone who uses Facebook would be able to relate to. Strength-wise, this particular episode was able to portray part of how our culture has evolved, in some ways not for the better, in a light that many people don't associate Facebook with, that light being a negative one. Facebook is great, I will attest to that, it allows me to keep in touch with people much easier than I would normally be able to. However at the same time I totally agree that sites like Facebook can be huge time-sinks in the forms of customizing, games, and adding friends just for the sake of "having friends". This episode of South Park highlighted all of those things and more, and is one of my favorite episodes of the show to date. I can't really think of anything negative to say about "You Have 0 Friends", some people may argue that they could have put some of the benefits Facebook provides into the episode, but this is South Park and they rarely talk about why anything really is good.
Engagement: For those that would like to learn more about the show visit http://www.southparkstudios.com/ there you can find an episode viewer, news about the show, and forums for all your South Park discussion needs.
To the outside viewer South Park may seem like a stupid animated show that doesn't contribute more than vulgar jokes and violence. If that person was to actually watch the show however, they would find that at least most of the episodes have significant cultural references and tie-ins that are smart, hilarious, and very accurate of how whatever it is that they are portraying should really be viewed. I strongly urge people to give this show a chance. Find an episode that looks appealing to you first, the show itself rarely needs to be viewed in any sort of order, and watch those episodes before you make an opinion. View the show in context as well, the vulgar language and violence are there because that's just what South Park is, take into consideration whatever it is they are parodying and view it from there. I hope that focusing on the parody style rather than the other components of the show can make new viewers more likely to enjoy it, or at least viewers who aren't watching for how ridiculous the show can really get. The 15th season of the show starts up this April on Comedy Central, and if you want to catch up on what's happened so far, every episode ever made is available to watch on the South Park Studios website that I posted above.
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