Logan Paul is a well known YouTube star, and without a doubt one of the internet’s most controversial figures. His most significant controversy to date is by far his Suicide Forest controversy, which began in early January of 2018 after Logan Paul uploaded a disrespectful YouTube vlog to the platform on December 31, 2017. The video showed Paul and some friends exploring the Aokigahara forest in Japan, which is infamous as a poplar suicide spot, and lo and behold, they ended up discovering a recent victim of suicide within minutes of entering the forest. They continue to approach the body, and after the initial shock of their discovery passes, they begin making insensitive jokes about the situation in which they found themselves, which Paul later defended as a “coping mechanism”. Paul ended up deleting this video soon after its release due to mass outrage from not only the YouTube community, but the internet as a whole. Paul could have easily treated the unfortunate discovery of this dead body with a much more professional approach by at least leaving the blurred image of the corpse out of the video and its thumbnail. Because of his poor treatment of this situation, his personal image was torn to shreds by a near endless supply of harsh criticism from every corner of the internet.
Social media allowed for the public to voice their opinions related to Logan Paul’s newest controversy, exemplifying the way that social media provides a platform for all who wish to voice their opinions directly to their target. This is certainly not the first time where social media has been employed for harsh criticism, as social media technology has been used in this manner ever since its creation. This relationship between media technology and human relationships is not a new social dynamic, but that is not to say that it holds any less effect than it used to. If anything, the impact of the social dynamics between media and human relationships has only grown as new media spreading techniques are developed. For example, despite the seriousness of the controversy, it inevitably sparked a very popular meme surrounding the incident, significantly spreading its popularity. The Logan Paul Suicide Forest meme had no fixed format. It was a joke which could be expressed in many different ways, and didn’t take a significant amount of inside knowledge to understand. Paul was already a controversial and meme-worthy figure before this controversy even began. All that was required to understand most memes related to the controversy was a general knowledge of who Logan Paul was, and the situation which he had found himself in. As a result, it was an extremely spreadable meme.
This meme, which was generated by the ever-evolving social dynamic between human relationships and media technology, became popular due to its spreadability. Through these memes and other means of media related communication, news sites, fellow YouTubers, and the general public all bashed Paul for his dire mistake. The relationship between human communication and media technology is constantly changing and always producing new methods of thought expression.
CITATIONS:
Caldwell, Don. Logan Paul’s Suicide Forest Video, Know Your Meme, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/logan-pauls-suicide-forest-video. Accessed 6 November 2018.