Lonely R Us OR Moses with a monkey puppet
Convergence Culture.New Artform.
Nefarious Narrative.
Forums. Films. Flicks with tricks.
Marketing Machinery?
Commodification and Cons?
Welcome to a new world where anything is anything.
A series of videos by an American teenage girl with the moniker "Lonelygirl15" has been getting a lot of attention lately on YouTube. An engaging story began to emerge with the Youtube videos Lonelygirl15 posted, and the video responses that came along.
It was all too nifty to be true: the editing, the "plot", the "performances." So people began speculating that it was some viral-marketing technique (used to promote a new TV series, or an autumn film release).
Deployed through the web, utilizing the fast and vast reach of a popular online video community, engaging the audience with social webspace (Lonelygirl15 also has a MySpace profile), the "Lonelygirl15" project intrigued many. Is she real? Are web videos and social websites the new frontiers in collaborative marketing/PR trickery?
Who is wagging the dog?
Adam Sternbergh has a nice article summarizing the curiosities and possibilities here.
In it, Adam states that the whole Lonelygirl15 incident might possibly mark the birth of a new art-form:
concept pieces initiated and created by both the artist and the audience that contain myriad realities spreading and spanning various interactive platforms on the web (blogs, videos sites, forums, friendsters/MySpace etc.)
Example: Think of a version of "Lost" (with an innumerous amount of characters and links in the narrative) where the content is NOT delivered to you, but instead, unearthed through your search and clicks through related webspace.
The people behind Lonelygirl15, are actually a bunch of experimental filmmakers.
And in the open letter to the people who have followed her YouTube exploits, they wrote:
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Right now, the biggest mystery of Lonelygirl15 is "who is she?" We think this is an oversimplification. Lonelygirl15 is a reflection of everyone. She is no more real or fictitious than the portions of our personalities that we choose to show (or hide) when we interact with the people around us. Regardless, there are deeper mysteries buried within the plot, dialogue, and background of the Lonelygirl15 videos, and many of our tireless and dedicated fans have unearthed some of these. There are many more to come.
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Apophenia, a social media researcher (whose buzzwords include "social software," "identity context," "social networks") shares with us, her thoughts on this revelation.
Basically, she felt it was all a bit more fun when we were all groping in the dark.
Ahhh...Excitement...Thy name is Imagination :)
Via clicks and keyboard dances, we hope to find actual people we can relate to. It's a laughable fantasy of course, critics of the inherent weaknesses of web communication would say.
"It's all in your imagination!"
That's the point isn't it?
Or, as the great monkuputubom sums up in a more depressing manner:
"......most of us are probably deep in delusion, ignorant and oblivious, with undetectable blindspots, and a sensitivity more prone to stimulation than true sensing. there are constructed realities, obstinate subjectivities, that divide us in subjugation to our own lonely perceptions. man is essentially alone; without sublimity we should all hurtle along like lemmings. throw me an epiphany soon, i pray."
posted by audaciousjoy @ 2:07 AM
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