Burgess' article in the Video Vortex Reader covers the idea of viral videos and the creative re-use and imitation of user-generated media through social networking websites. Youtube videos are not messages in and of them selves, but rather "mediating mechanisms" through which culture originates and redefines itself through emulation and redistribution. Cultural practices are born through a video's ability to be accessible to the masses for recycling. Bernard Drax, a character created for a virtual reality setting, represents this idea of creation and imitation. Participants in this virtual reality, Second Life, have their own ideas of a world at the tip of their fingers. Anything, from buildings, weather, people, can be created to emulate a sense of shared reality. Drax, for example, "covers" the atrocities of Guantanamo Bay, taking the viewer through a simulated version of the prison camp. Likewise, we see another reality in which we see Barack Obama campaigning for president. What both of these videos represent is the idea of user-generated awareness that is available to the masses to spread and create new cultural practices from.
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