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Originally posted by krushdbug:
So the mystical viral video thing kinda happened now, and thy name be Lonelygirl15. Probably a lot of you are already aware of it, it's a Vblog by a 16 year old girl and it has the YouTube addicts stumped.

Is it an art school project? A teaser for an upcoming film? Real? Fake? Is the girl's mystery religion really satanism? Is it the most clever product placement setup ever? People (including me) are watching every instalment with feverish curiosity, scanning every frame for clues (ok, I don't, I just read other people's synopsises) & coming up with wild theories.

Check it out at http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=lonelygirl15

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Originally posted by Moonage Daydream:
The give-away is that she's done media training

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Varion writes, "Having an ugly Myspace contest is like having a contest to see who can eat the most cheeseburgers in 24 hours... You're mocking people who, for the most part, have no taste or artistic training."

Varion, thanks for telling me what I was doing. I didn't even know I was mocking people.

For a very long time, taste and artistic training have been things that only a small number of people have been able to develop. Only a few people could afford to participate in the production of many types of media. Raw materials like pigments were expensive; same with tools like printing presses; even as late as 1963 it cost Charles Peignot over $600,000 to create and cut a single font family.

The small number of people who had access to these tools and resources created rules about what was good taste or bad taste. These designers started giving each other awards and the rules they followed became even more specific. All sorts of stuff about grids and sizes and color combinations — lots of stuff that the consumers of this media never consciously noticed. Over the last 20 years, however, the cost of tools related to the authorship of media has plummeted. For very little money, anyone can create and distribute things like newsletters, or videos, or bad-ass tunes about "ugly."

Suddenly consumers are learning the language of these authorship tools. The fact that tons of people know names of fonts like Helvetica is weird! And when people start learning something new, they perceive the world around them differently. If you start learning how to play the guitar, suddenly the guitar stands out in all the music you listen to. For example, throughout most of the history of movies, the audience didn't really understand what a craft editing was. Now, as more and more people have access to things like iMovie, they begin to understand the manipulative power of editing. Watching reality TV almost becomes like a game as you try to second-guess how the editor is trying to manipulate you.

As people start learning and experimenting with these languages authorship, they don't necessarily follow the rules of good taste. This scares the shit out of designers.

In Myspace, millions of people have opted out of pre-made templates that "work" in exchange for ugly. Ugly when compared to pre-existing notions of taste is a bummer. But ugly as a representation of mass experimentation and learning is pretty damn cool.

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I decided to watch one the other day, just to see what it was supposed to be about, and I found it... unwatchable. I literally could not force myself to watch more than the first few seconds after she started talking. It seemed terribly scripted, obviously fake at that mid-level of professionalism that marks, well, TV produced for the web. Maybe I just got a bad clip, or maybe I'm subconsciously biased by the second-hand exposure I've already had to it.

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"There is no place better to hide then right in the middle of L.A.," Goodfried said. "Everyone is so focused on themselves that I guess they don't even notice."