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:
If you call people stupid, they’ll hate you.
If you call people smart, they’ll love you.
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:
This is an activist prank to comment on the constant quest of capitalism to make us pay for what we once got for free. (See The Yes Men for a good example.)
OR… is this some marketing group trying to create a viral video business?
OR… is it just some wacky kids having some fun?
I wonder… does it matter?
If so, why? How does that knowledge actually change the content?
If you haven’t seen this movie, you are missing out on a major piece of Internet culture’s history. Here’s the trailer:
We Live in Public – 2008, 18A, 88 minutes
Ondi Timoner’s documentary chronicles a decade in the life of Internet pioneer Josh Harris, who instigated an “artificial society” experiment in which more than 100 artists lived under 24-hour surveillance in an underground compound in New York City. After FEMA broke up the project, Harris turned the cameras on himself and his girlfriend. Timoner’s provocative film (winner of the Grand Jury Prize: Documentary at Sundance) includes clips from Harris’s projects as well as her own original footage.
Keep it digital and catch it on Netflix. It’s scary and awesome, although the ending is a little weak. The point, through, is this notion that we are all encouraged to make our lives public. It is the way forward. “Web 2.0″, “User-created content”, “Social media”, assorted buzzwords yadda yadda…
Now that we’ve lived with these ideas for a few years, the hipster movement makes sense. After all, you can’t be cool all the time, and in an age of constant surveillance and recording you’re bound to do something stupid that people will take notice of. As a result, people claim it was “supposed to be ironic”.
That, or your idiotic status update was “just trolling lololollol”… sure, we believe you. No, really, I’m not typing sarcastically or anything.
The older generation got flinchy about public perception by doing what they always do: hiding behind “professionalism”. The number of dry, sterile public profiles that tell you nothing about the person in question is staggering. People have thrown themselves into mediocrity enthusiastically in order to keep the all-seeing eye of the Internet from making them look like an ass. So, instead, they look ignorable.
Now, if “ignorable” is part of the job description, then your resume is perfect. For the rest of us, its time to just be guileless and let the chips fall where they may. Either you’ll run your business yourself, or you’ll let the world run it for you.
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?
People hope that this makes it cool to spend too much time on Facebook.
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs fanboys want another hero, and hope that could be Zuckerberg.
Dreamers hope its true that if your girlfriend dumps you, you could get drunk, write some code, and make a billion dollars.
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.
A few years ago I remember quite a bit of fretting over closed-door meetings about virtual world interoperability. None of the participants in those meetings are responsible for the current innovations in this area.
What does that tell you about “closed” vs “open”.
/soapbox
BOSTON, MA – November 09, 2010 – The Immersive Education Initiative (http://ImmersiveEducation.org) today unveiled iED 3D/VR™, the open and royalty-free cross-platform 3D/VR mesh file format that enables 3D and virtual reality (3D/VR) content to be created once and and experienced across a range of virtual worlds, games, simulators and mixed/augmented reality applications. The culmination of over 2 years of work conducted through the Open File Formats Technology Working Group (OFF.TWG), iED 3D/VR is aligned with the COLLADA standard and currently supported by official iED virtual world platforms realXtend, Open Wonderland, Open Simulator (“OpenSim”) and Open Cobalt in addition to the candidate iED platform Sirikata.
A range of hands-on workshops will be given at iED 2011 (http://MediaGrid.org/summit) to teach educators how to create cross-platform 3D/VR content using a variety of authoring tools, including Google Sketchup and Blender, and starting immediately virtual training sessions will be provided to Initiative members online and free of charge.
iED 3D/VR is designed specifically to enable 3D and virtual reality content to be exchanged between all official Immersive Education Initiative platforms. To this end, iED 3D/VR a functional subset of COLLADA that is tested across conformant iED platforms to ensure consistent content representation from platform to platform. The current baseline profile for iED 3D/VR features static 3D mesh models and textures. New features and capabilities, such as animation and skinning, are now being added as well.
Thousands of Members Worldwide at http://ImmersiveEducation.org
The Immersive Education Initiative is a non-profit international collaboration of universities, colleges, research institutes, consortia and companies that are working together to define and develop open standards, best practices, platforms, and communities of support for virtual reality and game-based learning and training systems. Thousands of faculty, teachers, researchers, staff, administrators and students are members of the Immersive Education Initiative.
To learn more about the Media Grid, Immersive Education or the Education Grid visit:
http://MediaGrid.org, http://ImmersiveEducation.org and http://TheEducationGrid.org
