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?
So here’s a TED Talk about how humanity has suddenly become a completely different species, kinda:
http://www.ted.com Technology is evolving us, says Amber Case, as we become a screen-staring, button-clicking new version of homo sapiens. We now rely on “external brains” (cell phones and computers) to communicate, remember, even live out secondary lives. But will these machines ultimately connect or conquer us? Case offers surprising insight into our cyborg selves.
All hail the new flesh! Woot!
It certainly isn’t my place to argue with her and really, what’s a plebe like me going to add here? She nailed it. Or rather, she nailed us.
The only thing I suppose I could nit-pick is this notion of “slowing down”, which I hear echoed in everything from New Age and Zen to bleeding-edge technology conferences. People are spending an awful lot of time worrying about us becoming creatures that operate on a pure stimulus-response level, rather than thinking and creating ourselves.
This, I would argue, has nothing to do with technology. TV was demonized along the same lines. No, the problem isn’t the tech.
It’s the culture.
We live in a world where the wealthiest nations on the planet can’t be bothered to raise their own kids, or question the veracity of the nonsense that passes for news these days, or wonder if maybe there’s something to be concerned about when animals and insects are spontaneously dropping dead all over the globe. As long as we’re fed and entertained, we’re happy and content to take whatever we’re spoon-fed.
That’s not technology. That’s the sleep we’ve been slipping into as a people since my grandparents were born.
We’ll put up with a lot of nonsense if someone provides good content one out of five times, it seems. There was a time when Rocketboom was edgy and awesome, but as I had mentioned in a past post, they’ve been backslding.
Then:
Hmm. RE: TSA – People are being sexually assaulted in public, its been institutionalized, but they’re “a little bit safer” and you don’t mind.
Unsubscribed. Cripes…
More in the new year.