Global Culture

The December issue of Wired Magazine devoted its cover page to Lonelygirl15 with the article The Secret World of Lonelygirl by Joshua Davis. While this phenomenon is hardly new, I think it provides important cues as to how the well established medium of TV is facing its biggest threat.

In the summer of 2006, as the Lonelygirl15 video series gained popularity on YouTube, a growing collection of fans became obsessed with cracking the mystery of lonelygirl15. The Hunt for Bree became a major internet phenomenon that captured the attention of many YouTubers and was heavily covered in the mainstream media.   

It is not just the fact that an alternate channel to TV, such as YouTube, has gained enough attention to be valuated in over $1.65 billion dollars or even that certain enterpreneurs have already exploited the medium. I believe the relevance of this story is that it demonstrates clearly the birth of a new medium.McLuhan had established decades ago the consequences of TV as a new medium that would return society to its tribal ways, pushing the literate man back to an “acoustic” world where oral tradition is the preferred mechanism for cultural transfer. “Acoustic” was mostly used as a metaphor for “many things happening at once”. I believe that his position is even more accurate today to describe the transition from TV to a more fluid medium.First consider the fact that TV is mostly an exercise of serializing and organizing a complex story in a way that can be digested by the masses with little effort: from the rigidity of weekly schedules, seasonal programming, series of predefined length to the organization of several threads of action into a cohesive sequence that eliminates any possibility of misunderstanding the story. It’s not too different from the organization of a novel in a book that must address several tracks in a way to keep the reader engaged. The advantage of this approach is accessibility. Very little effort is required to consume.However, for a new generation of viewers, viewing is not enough. Participation is a must. The Lonelygirl15 phenomenon provides a preview of the type of interactivity that the audience is demanding. Unscheduled snippets of action, very short, cuasi-serialized but easily interchangeable, many different levels of stories that may appeal to different participants, alternate channels to get involved whether providing comments or producing additional snippets of content and endless hooks to plug-in their own ideas into the story. ¬†In this new medium there are no rules on how to consume the message, which distorts the message itself and provides creative license to the audience. Assuming there are smart producers listening to all the feedback, the evolution of such a venture is largely based on what the audience wants.In the near future, watching Lonelygirl15 or its next incarnation will allow the audience to react to the story while endless threads of stories become available, allowing every single person to experience it in a different way, requiring a strong oral tradition among those participants to maintain a global cohesion and ultimately realize the vision of this new medium. The “accoustic” approach would require not just watching all the snippets associated with a particular thread of action, but also catching up on what others have to say about the snippets they have uncovered. The story as a whole exists only when the community comes together to share their experiences consuming their individual versions.In the end of television I had already stated my position around the dimishing participation of TV in our daily lifes, but mentioned that we still needed the mechanisms to make the few tricks used by the techno-savvy elite available to all layers of society. If you can imagine YouTube with advanced interactive features that allow each user to follow a specific story as in those well-produced DVD’s that contain extra footage at the click of your remote, you’ll realize the mechanisms are becoming simple enough for a larger group of people to consume them. Expect your TV to be very lonely.Update: the Digital Ethnography site has an interesting post about YouTube as an enabler of a global community. The very same site that popularized the Lonelygirl series and inspired these thoughts. Their post addresses the very same point of participation.Update Nov 2007: a strike by Hollywood writers leads could lead to the reshaping of the industry according to Marc Andreessen in his post Suicide by strike. The scenario described above may become mainstream faster than anticipated.