As a Boston University undergraduate, “Sandy” Ocasio-Cortez joined other students in making a “Lisztomania Brat Pack mashup” video, a short film that was locally used as a promotional video for the Howard Thurman Center for Common Ground (and, according to its director, broadcast on TVs across campus) but also uploaded to YouTube in September 2010, joining many other professional and homemade variations of a mashup between Phoenix and The Breakfast Club that was posted by “AvoidantConsumer” in 2009. This video resurfaced on Twitter less than one day into Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s tenure, dug up from the past in an odd and ultimately ineffective attempt at shaming the popular progressive politician (though there are certainly vocal users of social media who believe that the film is a record of her limitations and flaws).
As far as digital records of college behavior go, it’s extremely innocuous. But it is an interesting object of analysis for folks interested in media history and archaeology, as Parker Higgins effectively documented on Twitter on the same day the video resurfaced. And the reception to the video in 2019 offers an interesting glimpse at where and how the long histories of social media, viral content, remix culture, and the professionalization of the web are going to be studied, remembered, and archived. I wanted to think out loud about some of these implications here.
