New Media, Life and Work Online
The Concept: users submit videos of themselves singing a part of a choir song.
The TED Talk:
Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir – ‘Lux Aurumque’:
UPDATE: Eric Whitacre — Sleep (Virtual Choir 2.0):
Everybody loves fantasy, but nobody likes to be made a fool.
When I blogged about Spiral Moon Media Inc.’s recent viral attempt, I left it about as ambiguous as the company itself left things. Is this for real, or is this a prank? What’s going on here?
The difficulty is that people are going to get angry. If a person sees the video, spends time thinking about how stupid this whole thing is, and then discovers that it was just an ad for Spiral Moon Media, there’s a reaction at that moment. What you WANT is: “Gee, that’s great! I’ll hire them!”
In the case of the “Share The Air” viral campaign, I don’t think that’s the reaction being generated. I try not too swear too much on this blog so I won’t type out what people’s reactions are.
Take, by way of contrast, Opulence, I has it:
Dogs playing poker. Gold grapes. A miniature giraffe. Plus, as an added bonus, an entire hoax website for Sokoblovsky Farms, “Russia’s finest purveyors of petite lap giraffes.”
The website itself has gone viral, and people find it completely awesome whether or not they think it’s real. But… why?
When you “peek behind the curtain” and see the wizard back there, you smile and laugh along with him. He wasn’t trying to trick you. Rather, he was putting on a show for your benefit. This was about you, not him. More to the point:
This is true whether they are, in fact, smart or stupid. It’s also true if they actually believed the deception or not.
Also see The North American House Hippo:
Respect the audience at all costs folks.
Hmm. This has to be the cutest blog post I’ve ever done.
Some are debating whether or not this recent proposal by “Rachel Sequoia” is an actual pitch to VCs at Venture Capital Fundraising Club of Silicon Valley (VCFC), or if it’s just a prank.
To me, that’s not the real question. The character of “Rachel Sequoia” is obviously not genuine and neither is the presentation. The real issue is whether:
I wonder… does it matter?
If so, why? How does that knowledge actually change the content?
Dubstep + Sheen’s megalomania + instant remix culture + celebrity culture = it must be 2011
To find anything close to Sheen’s recent antics you COULD refer to Tom Cruise’s couch-jumping on Oprah, but I think we’ve gone further then that. I submit to you, ladies and gentlemen, 25 seconds of Charles Manson.
See something familiar?
The Social Network is a movie based on the construction of Facebook.com. Its another story about a quirky genius who lives for his art, doesn’t care about money, and just wants to be loved. Just take that, mix in a bunch of standard “going into business movie” tropes, and you have this. In a sense the only thing that makes it unique is that most scenes are filmed in David Fincher’s preferred “dark-green-o-vision” to indicate the murky and manly depths of introspective turmoil, and lots of low-angled shots to force us to be impressed by everyone’s godliness.
It’s fine. A fair rating gives it 3 stars (of 5), or 4 stars if you really love this genre.
Most people don’t want to give it a fair rating though. They’re screaming “5 stars!” as loudly as they can with fingers in their ears to block out any dissenters, and telling everyone who will listen to get in to see this thing. The buzz has been unbelievable. People are even talking about Academy Awards for the leading actors, despite the lack of any moments in the movie dramatic enough to justify this.
Why?
As of October 31st the movie had grossed $132.9 million at the box office. So, what have we learned? The same thing that we learned when those horrid Twilight movies hit it big: insecure people love to spend money. Pander to them.