So, YouTube’s Lonelygirl15 was a fake. Well, I can’t say, “I told you so,” because though I did view a clip and shake my head about how this was not a 16-year-old or a regular blogger, I didn’t post about it. (I don’t remember doing so, anyway.)
But you know, the news that it’s fake (here too!) includes all kinds of speculations about whether the makers of this sham project are going to quit or not. After all, if it were me, I’d be turning the project on its head, making a film about this girl who’s hired to make a fake videoblog which then gets discovered and what happens in the wake of that, when all the spooky stuff from the blog actually turns out to be part of some nasty plot by the guy who hired her to do the fake blog… etc. There’s a kind of virtual-Blair-Witch-Project appeal to that, I find. It could be made to work…
All of this is interested for two reasons: for one, it seems that we have begun, as a society, to inoculate ourselves against “viral marketing”. For another, it seems that something like Whuffie, and something like peer review, could possibly become some part of daily life, at least for those of us online.
Than again, real videobloggers like cutiemish and Silentbat don’t seem to be world-famous yet… they’re not quite idoru. Then again, they’re young, and you never know what they’ll do with the medium.
More interesting to me is the idea that the whole model of blogs and videoblogs may well change over time, until they resemble Rudy Rucker’s Lifebox concept (or listen here) in some way. If bitrot doesn’t set in, can you imagine your grandkids surfing over to Youtube.com and seeing grandpa or grandma in a whole new light? If that scares you, shut down your blog, because whatever you do online just might not go away.
But personally, I would have loved to read my grandparents’ blogs, seen their photostreams, watched their videoblogs one by one. Beautiful anachronism, and wonderful to experience people whose genes you share, who live in another time that, in some ways, feels more like another place.
To hell with posterity. I love imagining even just one of my grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, or farther-off descendants, reading my blog and this long-ago person snapping into clearer, bizarrely intimate focus.
We’ve leaving voices to echo through time. That is, if bitrot doesn’t set in first. And that, to me, makes blogging somewhat less strange, and somewhat more beautiful.
Even moreso since, after all, it’s likely it’ll only be one in thousands who’ll actually take any interest in any of it, given just how much of it is going to be floating around, increasingly as the generations go by. Realistically, it may take generations before any kid downstream in time takes even enough interest to skim through the contents of this blog, or whatever I eventually publish. But… I know I would have loved to have had my own ancestors’ blogs.
PS: This is fascinating, as is this response to the flamers.