A few months ago Marina Shifrin danced away from her current job. She was working for a video producing company and decided to give her resignation by honoring the company she was working for; by making a video. However, she wasn’t very content with this particular company and decided to share her feelings on the video – and then put in on YouTube, of course. In the video Shifrin in dancing to Kanye West song Gone and complaining how she has sacrificed her life and social relationships for two years to this company, and her boss is only paying attention to the number of views her videos are getting. Well, at least this video got millions of views in few days and Shifrin became famous. (Of course the company wasn’t too happy about this and decided to respond her by doing a dancing video of their own.)
Marina wasn’t happy about her job and she could have resigned like a normal person does but she decided to do it in front of millions of people. Why did she do that? I believe that her plan wasn’t only to resign or tell the world what a shitty company she was working for. She wanted to bring forth the issue that most companies in today’s world are facing; focusing on quantity over quality. It’s not only a problem of the companies working with the web (how many likes, views, followers, etc. they get) but it is a reality we are living; focus only on the profit instead of the actual things that the company and its employees are doing and the feelings they are feeling. This is not maybe editing reality itself (making it more media-like) but changing our ways of thinking and editing the ways we see the world. The reality is constructed of the way we think and see our lives. I believe that in some kind of way, Shifrin is hoping to edit not only her reality but trying to do it for all of us who are living in today’s consuming-oriented and quantity-focused world.
Why I Heart My Media 