Questions: YouTube and Facebook

It has to be said, Wired.com is fabulous. If I had been a more diligent student and read these links ahead of time I would have been aware of the wonderfulness that is encapsulated in this web site. Ok, so maybe I don’t agree with all of the writers, I have a brain so I’m not expected to, but I utterly appreciate the topics that make up the majority of the site’s content. Bravo Wired, Bravo.

Ass kissing over, lets get to the meat of this post. Below are a few questions, as requested, for my Writing for Electronic Communities class. The readings for the class included Garfield on YouTube, Davis on LonelyGirl15 and Vogelstein on Facebook.

Q1) Money rules, or at least, it always has in TV land and Hollywood. To make something in these industries, you need money, or the attention of people who have money – but not so for the creators of YouTube and Facebook. They started off by themselves, without the influence of huge corporations, creating a vision of their own. But as sites gain popularity and influence, they eventually sell out. YouTube sold to Google, Facebook was going to sell to Yahoo – does the selling of these sites to larger corporations endanger the integrity of the site itself and how could it effect users? Should the creators of these sites maintain ownership or is it just not feasable?

Q2) On Garfield’s reading, one YouTube user states, “One of the biggest obstacles to advertising success is the damage that success could inflict on the YouTube experience, till now an oasis of relative noncommercialism in a world of brand inundation. The Google deal has already spawned bitterness at the grass roots, where some are dubious that GooTube will retain its soul. “I think its the beginning of the end of youtube as we know it,” wrote a poster named SamHill24. Another, Link420, declared simply, “ITS OVER!!!! youtube is screwed.”"

Is it really screwed? Or will Google’s investments help push the Internet-TV medium forward and provide new opportunities? What, exactly, do you think Google plans to do with this site?

Q3) LonelyGirl15 creators Mesh Flinders and Miles Beckett wanted to harness the power of authenticity and exploit the anonimity if the Internet to pull off a new type of storytelling. They hired an actress to play the part of Bree and for all intents and purposes, pretended that this girl was real – why? What did they think this would accomplish? Eventually, as LonelyGirl15’s popularity grew, the truth came out:

“IN EARLY SEPTEMBER, MATTHEW FOREMSKI, the 18-year-old son of a Silicon Valley tech reporter, dug up an old version of Rose’s MySpace page. She’d deleted it when she became Bree, but Google cached a copy, and Foremski posted the link to his father’s blog. Within 48 hours, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and a slew of TV stations ran the story. The jig was up. Many assumed the series would sputter and die. Media reports zeroed in on how viewers had been duped, suggesting an inevitable backlash. But the fans – raised on the unreality of reality TV and with the role-playing ethos of the Web – seemed to take the revelation in stride.”

Some people lament about the popularity of reality TV shows, between American Idol and Survivor, but these are what people want to see. Obviously LonelyGirl15 follows that trend, so why bother to hide that it was fictitous? What does it say about our society that we are generally not concerned if something is ‘fake-reality’? What do sites like YouTube provide for us that makes us clammer to watch and participate?

Q4) Davis muses that Internet TV is created by advances in technology, sites like YouTube and a hybrid of storytelling. It is this idea of hybrid story telling that has me fascinated. What the hell is hybrid storytelling? We have clear genres for traditional text based writing: novel, scripts, plays, poetry, memoir, creative non-fiction… but what about this master’s class we are taking? What constitutes as Electronic Writing? Anything that is published online? Does hybrid storytelling include hypertext? What category exactly does LonelyGirl15 fit into; it is interactive with viewers, its followers can influence the outcome of the story line, so in a sense, do you think it can be experienced and has the same qualities of a hypertext novel, only in a visual form?

Q5) What bothers me about sites like YouTube and Fackbook is that no matter what, like a frigging boomerang, money keeps coming back into question. Vogelstein, when discussing Facebook’s creator, Mark Zuckerberg’s success, mentions the Three C’s: Connection, Communication and Commerce. I hate that last C, inevitable though it may be. Think about why Facebook was started – so Zuckerberg could stay in touch with his college friends. This whole social networking phenomenon was started by the first two C’s, Connection and Communication – and it worked just fine. Now commerce is added and yes, the site and logo gain nortoriety, but does money diminish the original goals of Facebook? Is it not more impressive that Mark Zuckerberg created a site that re-connects/connects millions of people, rather than applaud him for the amount of zero’s that are put on his paycheck? Even with a potentially limitless medium like the Internet, does Capitolism triumph over the freedom humanistic endevour, expression and interaction?