Viral videos battle it out at Nightlight

UNC graduate student Adam Rogers has turned one of America’s new ways of killing time into a competition.

Allowing competitors to pick a video to duke it out, he constructed a tournament in which YouTube videos vie for the applause and laughter of an audience.

Riding the success of his first attempt in April, Rogers is presenting his second YouTube Tournament at Nightlight tonight with hopes of doing more than just watching clips of dramatic rodents and shoe shopping.

Rogers and three of his classmates in Human Information Interactions (INLS 500) have turned YouTube video watching into a communal gathering where videos compete for audience approval.

“We’re trying to do something different that is based in new media but attempts to bring people together in person,” said Rogers, a graduate student in the Department of Information and Library Science. “It’s a unique event that is different than most things people will be doing on a Thursday night.”

At the initial tournament in April, competitors battled one-on-one with hand-picked online videos attempting to win both the vote of judges and the audience in order to move on to the next round. There they chose a new video to compete until one person prevailed as champion and was presented with a prize befitting such a competition: a Snuggie.

“Basically, the event is an incredible opportunity to view YouTube videos on a big screen,” said Nightlight owner Alexis Mastromichalis, explaining why she enjoyed the last tournament.

“I don’t get the chance to watch YouTube much. Plus, someone entered the Susan Boyle video, which had just premiered the night before.”

This time Rogers took video submissions for entry via the tournament’s Twitter, Facebook and Gmail accounts and is hoping to bring the number of participants up from 12 to 16. Also, the judges have been eliminated, and winners will be chosen solely on the level of audience applause according to a decibel meter.

Due to time restraints, the only guideline for picking videos is it must be somewhere near or below three minutes in length. Other than that, one could pick a video along several lines to try to swing the impressionable electorate.

“You can play something that is verifiably funny because 50 million people have watched it, or you can play something that no one has seen to play that card,” said Rogers, who has never competed due to organizational duties.

“I also like the idea of professional content competing with amateur created content. YouTube is indicative of the shift from corporately produced content to do-it-yourself.”

Even with the amount of time it takes to put together each YouTube Tournament, Rogers thinks the events have garnered enough interest that they can catch on and maybe even spread to more cities.

“Ideally I’d like to see people come out with a list of, like, 12 videos,” Rogers said. “That way, if someone plays ‘David goes to the dentist,’ then the other person can come back with a remix video that turns ‘David goes to the dentist’ into a Baltimore club jam.”


Contact the Diversions Editor at dive@unc.edu.