I just read this fascinating article in Wired Magazine about Lonelygirl15. Lonelygirl15, if you aren’t familiar, was a “made for YouTube” video series–two guys(Mesh Flinders, and Miles Beckett) directed it and hired an actress to play what seemed to be a real girl. They basically created episodes in her life as though they were a tv show, but because YouTube allows blogging and discussion, viewers could discuss what they were seeing and interact with “her” via email. (although they were really interacting with someone else who was writing as her). According to the article, they knew they were onto something when one of their episodes got 500,000 views. (In comparison, a cable tv show needs 300,000-500,000 viewers to be considered successful.) Anyway, what interested me about all this (besides presenting something as real that was fictional), was that the two male directors are now being courted by the mainstream studio and network world, but they are frustrated because the studios don’t seem to get the interactive nature of the new medium they are working in.
“…Their first sit-down with a major broadcaster was, [attorney]Goodfried says, an ‘exercise in futility.’ Beckett tried to explain to the executive that the central theme of online entertainment was interactivity, as opposed to the passivity of television. He wanted to create shows in which the line between reality and fiction is blurred, where viewers can correspond with the characters and actually become involved in the story by posting their own videos. The exec responded by walking them through his fall lineup and pointing out that the network’s Web site had great supplemental video material for the season’s upcoming shows.
Beckett is clearly frustrated….”It’s a new medium…The way the networks look at the Internet now is like the early days of TV, when announcers would just read radio scripts on camera. It was boring…” (p. 239, December 2006 Wired)
His statement struck me on all sorts of levels–how easy it is for a lot of our students to “get” this but how hard it is for us sometimes. And how the behometh will start responding once there is money to be made (YouTube being purchased by Google for example), and tools like this will become much more mainstream. It just seems that because everything is moving at lightening speed, we in “the school business” are going to find ways to be much more responsive, through our policies, and our practices.
There are so many fabulous topics to discuss related to this article for an educator– ethical issues relating to the video purporting to be real, psychological issues like the fact that some users didn’t seem to care when they found out she wasn’t and continued communicating with a fictional character, and economic issues about the financial model of television versus the web.
So even if we don’t fully understand the technology there are so many issues we can discuss with our students and that they do need help with understanding. To me that is our key role as educators in dealing with all these new mediums is bringing in the deeper level of thought and discussion.Comments? thoughts on this? Carolyn
