Unofficial Saint Patrick’s Day is an infamous campus-wide event celebrated on the first Friday in March every year at the University. While this event is in no way supported or condoned by the University, students still sport their green with beers in their hands from sun up till sun down.
This year’s Unofficial events were captured by the Youtube sensation channel “I’m Shmacked,” created by YofrayFilms. The “I’m Shmacked” series presents 3 to 5 minutes of college students in various forms of partying in their University setting for a specific event or day. In addition to days like Unofficial, videos have been created for events such as Little 5 at Indiana University, Mardi Gras at Tulane University, Halloween Weekend at Arizona State University and Welcome Week at University of Michigan, to name a few.
UrbanDictionary.com defines the term “shmacked” as “[becoming] intoxicated to the point of not even being able to stand up, know what’s going on, or correctly pronounce any word.” According to this definition, the Youtube series is appropriately titled as most of the students in each appear to be “shmacked” while consuming copious amounts of alcohol and engaging in ridiculous behavior.
In each video, the faces of students are clearly visible and recognizable to viewers. The University’s Unofficial video features students chugging beer out of pink plastic flamingos, taking pulls from a Burnetts handle, doing beer bongs, engaging in public urination and shouting obscenities.
This type of publicly accessible footage presents several negative outcomes for those featured in the video. Firstly, any employer can easily access the video, and upon seeing a current interviewee, they may instantly dismiss him or her based on the behavior displayed in the video. One must ask his or herself if 5 seconds of facetime on a video such as “I’m Shmacked” is really worth the sacrifice if a potential job or career could be snatched away in an instant.
A second poor effect of the video series is that they display untrue and potentially harmful representations of each school that is being filmed. The University of Illinois is an outstanding university with equally impressive students; what they choose to do with their free time is their decisions. When underage binge drinking and partying is portrayed in such a public forum, employers and others may lose interest in the University, or apply a negative association to it.
Creators Jeffrie Ray and Arya Toufanian claim in an article from The New York Times that the point of the series is to demonstrate the social atmosphere of each school. However, each video is a poor representation of the caliber and abilities of the students that attend the school, and creates more harm than good.
The viewers of “I’m Shmacked” are not informed as to whether each person featured in the videos provided their consent to be filmed, or even are aware of the fact that their recreational drinking activities may be posted for anyone to view online. Beneath each video reads the tagline: “No alcohol or illegal substance was used during filming, just prop.” This vague statement is all the viewer has to indicate that the creators remained objective forces in the whole project.
The Unofficial “I’m Shmacked” video in no way represents the purpose of the event, nor does it display what it is like to be on campus on Unofficial, or any day for that matter. Students need to be aware of videos such as these and the harmful effects they may have on their futures.