Jennifer Hernandez

4/19/2023
Lopatko
Writ2

You're Cancelled

For the genre translation assignment, I choose to translate, "Platform Drama:"

Cancel Culture "and the Struggle for Accountability YouTube" by Rebeces Lewis and

Angele Christian. Published by the Department of Communication, Stanford University

in 2022. The article is presented in the academic Journal of Communications, where the

audience is academic scholars. Whereas the translation that I am doing has the

audience of teenagers and it will be in a magazine form. The main takeaway from my

magazine article will be that teenagers feel more educated on the topic of cancel

culture. The academic article was about how canceled culture has structure and

impersonal issues since at times it seems that cancel culture can fail at holding people

accountable, and at times give people an even bigger platform.

The main reason that I choose this article was because of the absurd amount of

time I spend on Twitter and watching drama channels on YouTube. I feel that over the

years I have gained much knowledge about the cancel culture world. But also with the

thought that as the social media world grows, the need to hold people accountable for

their actions grows as well. Most of the time the people that get canceled are celebrities.

The majority of people that follow these artists are young impressionable people. Who

will most likely think that this behavior is acceptable, when it really is not? I picked a

magazine layout since a believe this would be one way to reach my new audience,

teenagers, since they try to keep up with the latest trends. And magazines are known
for educating people through their short but informative pages all about the newest,

hottest trends at the moment. Since my audience is teenagers I felt like a magazine

would be an easy form to understand. But at the same time, I would have focused on

cancel culture so that the teenagers, can understand what cancel culture really is.

In the article "Platform Drama:" Cancel Culture "and the Struggle for

Accountability YouTube", there were explanations about what cancel culture is, how it

worked, and why cancel culture is justified. Cancel Culture is defined as a way to hold

celebrities accountable for their morally wrong actions. Cancel culture can also be

viewed as a boycott, in which people are discouraged to buy their products, and even

watching their content. They and their are referring to the people that are getting

canceled. Until they put out a formal apology, in which they show sincere regret, and

admit to their wrongdoings. According to the article drama channels on YouTude, are

the ones that highly advocate for cancel culture, since they are the ones that make

videos going in-depth about how they should be canceled and how they should

apologize. The main reason that drama channel advocate for cancel culture is

because,” drama channels make other YouTubers have accountability . . . We’re here to

be the sense of morality on YouTube.” Similarly, Julia (TeaKettle).” (Rebeces Lewis and

Angele Christian) Since they are a sense of morality, they feel the need to hold

YouTubers as well as celebrities in check.

One of the biggest differences between the academic article and the magazine

article was the length, the article had over 20 pages of information, while my magazine

article had 2 pages. To eliminate having multiple pages that a normal magazine would

not have. I planned to focus on just the main points that the journal keeps talking about,
like the example that they brought up with James Charles. The main points that I writing

about were, what is cancel culture about, who gets canceled, and the trend of apologies

since I believe that teenagers would be interested in the topics mentioned above. Of

course, I will provide a nice background so that they do not get confused and feel lost.

When I was preparing to do the translation I was very worried about it at first

since I have never had a project like this. So I had to keep in mind how I was going to

change this dense academic article into something that a teenager would find

interesting. Keeping the audience in mind is a great way to Know your audience can be

very helpful when writing because it helps you target the main people that you want

your message to reach out to. One must remember that when dealing with an audience

change “Nothing has changed but the audience, and yet you’ve quickly created a whole

new message, changing both the content and the language you were using”.(Ried)

That’s why when I was writing my magazine article I tried to keep in mind that teenagers

are my intended audience and that I needed to make sure that this article was

engaging, interesting to understand, and also conveyed the message that I wanted to

send through.

The one thing that I was worried about when writing this article was switching the

genre from an academic article to a magazine article since the writing style is very

different. One has academic jargon and a lot of data while the other has slang and an

overall less formal view of the subject. Knowing what kind of genre is helpful since,” In

other words, knowing what a genre is used for can help people to accomplish goals”.

(Dirk) One way that I tried to conquer this is by looking at a few article examples from

“TeenVouge”, these examples helped me understand how I wanted my article to look

and how I wanted my article to feel. It needs to have a few paragraphs, that directly in a

way communicate/talk to the audience. That is my main focus when I was writing my

article. But by also ” studying the genres that we find familiar, we can start to see how

specific choices that writers make result in specific actions on the part of readers; it only

follows that our own writing must be purposefully written.”(Kerry Dirk) Studying and

looking over magazine articles also really help me know how I wanted my article to be

formed. It also make me take a closer look at the overall purpose of my magazine article

it made, I think this was the best way to accomplish my goal.

Overall this project made me think a lot about genres and how we adjust to fit in

with the genre that we desire. There were some difficulties on the way but with the

knowledge that I have gained throughout these past few assignments. That has helped

me feel more comfortable when changing genres. And overall taught me how to think

about writing in a different way. Since I have never been assigned to do a genre

translation before coming to this class. It was also in this class where I learned all about

the different genres.

 Works Cited

Kerry Dirk. ”Navigating Genres” Writing Spaces, Readings on Writings, vol. 1,

2010, pp 249-262. Bitzer, Lloyd F. et al

E. Shelley Ried,” Ten Ways To Think About Writing: Metaphoric Musings for

College Writing Student”, Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Vol.2, 2011, edited by

Charles Lowe and Pavel, pp 3-23

Rebecca Lewis and Angèle Christin, “Platform drama: “Cancel culture,” celebrity,

and the struggle for accountability on YouTube”, New Media & Society, vol 24, 2022, pp

1632-1656