Digital Creativity

Narratives

Trevor looks like an average guy in his late teens. But recently he’s found, as he’s becoming famous, that he gets a lot more attention from girls at his high school. Turns out, he’s one of hottest hands on Revver, a new online video-sharing service. And he’s even making a little bit of money for his troubles, which only further enhances his sense of well-being.

Trev specializes in mash-ups. He started by digitizing parts of his favorite TV shows and posting them to YouTube, but he found that they kept getting taken down and he’d have to create new user accounts to keep uploading files. Plus, other people were posting regular TV all over the web, and he didn’t see the point after a while. Then he got a Mac for his birthday. It had the coolest suite of editing software. He started to shoot a bit of digital video, but mostly he would find clips other people made online. He’d stitch them together on his Mac, overlay a music track he liked, and post them online. He called himself the MashUpKing.

Trev specialized in humor. He liked to make fun of politicians, mainly, but other people he thought were stupid would do, too. He found that his videos had the most impact if he pulled together a bit of film footage, or an old ad, that people would recognize, and used a popular soundtrack, the impact of his mash-up would be greatest. A tiny bit of a Victoria’s Secret fashion show didn’t usually hurt, either. But the key was that it had to be funny, and maybe a bit weird.

Trevor’s videos started to get incredibly popular. His big break came when his mash-up, “Don’t You Love Me Anymore?,” a satire on the Tony Blair-George Bush relationship, showed up in the “Editor’s Picks” section of a big video site. From then on, every time “MashUpKing” uploaded a video on Revver or YouTube, he’d get at least a hundred thousand views. He got “favorited” by more users on one social network than any other video producer. Bloggers all over the web started to call him a “leading independent media artist” and Revver began to send him checks that had a couple of zeros in them.

And then his friends at school began to notice. Trevor had a hot hand.

INSPIRING ARTICLES

Narrative 1: Chico Bongalar

"Chico Bongalar is a tubby twenty-something guy - real name Grant - and he likes making videos. At the moment Chico is the No 1 attraction on Trouble Homegrown, the UK television channel's attempt to mirror the runaway success of web sites like MySpace and YouTube.

Chico talks about his life, getting a suntan and eats a slice of bread. Doesn't sound like much, but he created a bit of a buzz. Chico is part of a new wave of amateur vi-deo talent that includes the Beijing karaoke champs, aka the Chinese Backstreet Boys (sponsored by Coca-Cola), the folk singer Sandi Thom (now with a £1 million recording deal) and the Arctic Monkeys, who went from obscurity to the Brit Awards, all kickstarted by the web.

Chico and millions of others who upload amateur videos to the growing number of user-generated content sites such as YouTube have sent shockwaves through big media companies - and executives are sitting up and paying attention.

It's not just for the size of the audience; there's the increasingly contentious issue of content ownership and control.

Chico's video narratives are free online, just like all MySpace and YouTube content, because people like Chico create this stuff mostly just to share ideas and get atten-tion. Until recently, online fame and the potential of discovery seemed enough, and the commercialisation of so-called user-generated content (UGC) sites was not an issue - because the sites were startups and below the radar of big media organisa-tions. But that's all changing.

Sites such as YouTube are growing up. MySpace is now owned by News Corpora-tion. Trouble's Homegrown and MTV Flux have been created by publicly-listed, bot-tom-line-oriented media companies. They may be interested in nurturing new talent, but the MTVs of the world also want to profit from this new creative pool.

"YouTube and MySpace are all about community, and I don't believe that their initial plans were to commercially exploit uploaded material, but rather only to build busi-ness models based on ad revenues," says Alexander Ross, a partner at Wiggin LLP, a media and technology law firm. "Contrast that with an MTV and some others, who appear to be approaching the model more from a broadcaster's perspective."

Literally citation from "The Guardian: Whose content is it anyway?" (2006)

Narrative 2: The Phenomenon of YouTube

"When two twenty-somethings posted a home-made video on YouTube last week they initially attracted more than 1.3m views, but they didn't earn a cent for their efforts. This didn't matter to them because the two in question, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, owned the company and had just sold it to Google for $1.65bn. But the fact that they didn't get paid is still a matter of some interest. We are at the start of a creative revolution on the web, enabling millions of people to publish their own videos, music, photographs, books, blogs or whatever, and it is important to make sure it doesn't turn into a rip-off for a new breed of intermediaries. Content is king, but the king has yet to be voted a stipend.

The curious thing about YouTube is that the people who ought to be paid (individual content creators) aren't actually campaigning for it, while corporate providers are threatening legal action over clips pirated on YouTube - even though normally they are only too happy to pay a media platform to show clips of films or TV shows to generate interest in watching the whole thing or buying it as a DVD.

The creators of YouTube have done a great service in bringing video creation to the masses. But it was not because their technology was superior to others in the field (it wasn't), but because they were in the right place at the right time when, unpredictably, YouTube suddenly attracted critical mass. This was a huge victory for garage start-ups over the likes of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, which found to their cost that the mighty leverage arising from their big market shares in existing products buttered no parsnips in the new world of web creativity."

Literally citation from "The Guardian: We really need some discontent creators" (2006)

Narrative 3: Police track reckless Driver on YouTube

Police took up pursuit in cyberspace after a young Norwegian posted on the Internet video of his wild car driving. Following an electronic trail that he left online, police caught him and slapped him with real-life fine $1,300.

The Norwegian, identified only as a man in his early 20s, posted the video called "Driving in Norway" on Google Inc.'s popular video-sharing site YouTube. The recording showed the car's speedometer hitting up to 150 miles - 240 kilometers - per hour on a public highway near Oslo. "We're touching 240," a voice could be heard saying. "We know it will do it. This is a little nice."

The video was removed from the Web site after it made national news in Norway last week. Police said they could prove only that the man had driven an average of 86 miles per hour and based the fine, which the motorist accepted, on that speed. Norway's speed limit is as high as 62 miles per hour, though lower on most roads.

"It is disturbing that young people test high speeds on highways like that, and then, on top of it, use the Net to boast about the misdeed afterward," said Morten Hassel of the district police's traffic unit.

Literally citation from siliconvalley.com

Narrative 4: Stevie Ryan

Stevie Ryan recently received her first Oscar, only eighteen months after moving to Los Angeles to become a movie star. She grew up in California’s high desert, in a town along the road to Las Vegas called Victorville. Her parents worked at calibrating truck scales for weigh stations on the interstate - a family business going back two generations on her mother’s side. Throughout her childhood and adolescence, Ryan harbored escape fantasies involving the Hollywood of her parents’ and grandparents’ generations - Lucille Ball, Audrey Hepburn, Buster Keaton, Clara Bow - but she never participated in high-school theatrical productions. She did attend her high-school prom dressed as Marilyn Monroe, down to the elbow-length gloves. (Her date wore a Mohawk and muttonchops.) After a brief stint in community college, she concluded that she was “too right-brain for school,” and followed her older brother to Huntington Beach - anything to get out of Victorville. Then she decided to move to L.A. and to see what happens.

The Oscar was delivered rather unceremoniously - not in March, at the Academy Awards - but in August during a three and a half minutes sketch that Ryan was filming while she was acting as Little Loca, an eighteen-year-old Latina from East L.A.. This was about the fortieth in a series of short homemade video sketches that Ryan uploaded onto the video-sharing site YouTube and had by then attracted over a million viewings.

“Damn, this shit is heavy,” Loca said, in a pronounced Hispanic accent, after accepting the gold statuette and waving it around. “I could knock somebody out with this.” Then she launched into an earnest acceptance speech. “I want to thank YouTube,” she said. “You’re so important in my life right now. And without YouTube there’s no way in hell Loca could have, you know, got something like this.”

In fact, YouTube helped Ryan to real fame. Over the previous three months, Loca’s fans, many of them Hispanic, had warmed to her story: spunky ghetto kid with an overprotective older brother, a 4.0 grade-point average, and her innocence proudly intact. (That gang sign that she seemed to flash at the end of each video was really a sideways V, for virgin.). During a recent trip to San Francisco, she had been accosted by a group of teens at a mall, wanting to know if she was “Little Loca from YouTube”. She also was now being represented by a Hollywood agency. “Seriously, if you Googled me, like, a couple months ago, you wouldn’t get crap,” she said, typing her name into the search engine. “I’m just a normal person. And now you actually get stuff. It’s, like, crazy. That’s more than I could ever ask for, just to be on Google.” The search led to a fan site for various celebrities; Stevie Ryan’s name and head shot were featured alongside Tom Cruise, Rachel McAdams, and Johnny Depp.

Ryan's show-business career begun six months ago when she started making videos with a Sony Handycam. They were mostly vintage-style silent films which she edited, with no formal training, using Windows Movie Maker. She experimented with uploading a few of the films onto YouTube, and only then discovered the site’s ruthlessly populist ethos: what people seemed to like was not pretentious art films with obvious Hollywood aspirations but the confessional blogs of usual people. Little Loca - a composite of the tough-talking, strong-willed kind of girls Ryan used to admire during her youth - was born.

Within a few weeks, YouTube became a full-time pursuit for Ryan. “It’s basically all I do,” she says. Ryan prefers to shoot Little Loca videos straight through, without editing, to create the genuine feel of a video blog.

The quest for stardom that had led her to Hollywood now pitted her against nonprofessionals in Toronto and Pittsburgh and Tasmania. Similarly as in Hollywood's real show-business, competition on YouTube is hard. “Four months ago, when I was first on YouTube, it was not where it’s at right now,” she says. “I think Little Loca was, like, No. 5 most-subscribed, and now, like, I’m No. 15 - because why? There’s all these other people they’re featuring on there. And it’s, like, bullshit.”

According to YouTube's CEO Chad Hurley, the company wants to democratize the entertainment process. "People want to be seen, and we're providing the largest audience for that" Hurley says. An exemplary case for YouTube as a "democratizer" is Peter the geriatric. Peter, a seventy-nine-year-old widower turned up his webcam and announced: "I got addicted to YouTube". He uploaded the video under the title "First Try" and it has now been seen nearly two million times. However, Peter was not a truly democratic star. Like an aspiring model who is spotted in a drugstore by a hot-shot agent, he had been plucked from the crowd and thrust directly into the spotlight. In contrast, Ernie Rogers, may represent the ultimate realization (and corruption) of YouTube's democratic ideal. Rogers is a twenty-three-year-old guitar player. Although on his user profile he bills himself as a "typical guy", Rogers has watched more than nine hundred thousand videos on YouTube since May. That averages approximately two hundred and fifty per hour, not allowing for sleep. What he watches, primarily, is his own guitar solos (or the first few seconds of them) over and over, to boost his view counts to levels that will make others take notice. His strategy seems to have been successful: One of his solos has been viewed two hundred thousand times - and only sixty thousand of those viewings were by him.

Despite of various career opportunities through YouTube, Ryan fears that YouTube was screwing her over. She believes that YouTube artificially suppress her page views and do not "feature” her the way they had featured Peter the geriatric. “O.K., seriously? They do not like me on here,” she said. “They hate my guts. I’ve never been featured, so I don’t watch the featured videos now. I’m really angry at YouTube. I don’t care what anybody says, they’re doing it on purpose. I have written probably like, I don’t know, a million letters."

A few weeks later, Ryan posted a new Little Loca installment. Less than forty-eight hours after Ryan uploaded the video, it was removed from the site, further fuelling Ryan’s suspicions. “They removed my video because YouTube always removes my videos”.

The real reason for her video’s removal had nothing to do with any personal antipathy toward her among the YouTube staffers. YouTube had received a Digital Millennium Copyright Act complaint from a third party. Apparently, Ryan’s mistake had been to edit her sketch too ambitiously, post-dubbing the Wu-Tang Clan soundtrack that was distinct from the video recording, and therefore digitally traceable. Had she merely played the song on her stereo while shooting the scene on the sofa, there would have been no way for anyone to detect it, short of watching every video on the site.

Shortened version from "The New Yorker: it should happen to you" (2006), parcially edited

Narrative 5: OK Go Band

In pop music, synchronized dance routines have typically been the domain of boy bands, girl groups and the high-school talent show contestants who idolize them. But with the video for its single A Million Ways, the Chicago rock band OK Go has claimed coordinated dancing for a legion of semicoordinated hipsters -- who, in turn, have helped make it one of the most celebrated, and wildly circulated, Internet phenomena of the year.

Shot on digital video last April, the clip shows the band's four members performing an elaborately choreographed dance routine in the singer Damian Kulash's backyard. OK Go's most talented dancer, the bassist Tim Nordwind, lip-syncs the song, a slinky disco-rock tale of a barfly and the femme fatale whose fish nets he can't stop ogling.

The three-minute dance, which includes moves inspired by The Matrix and West Side Story, is at once a sight gag worthy of Spike Jonze (in terms of physical grace, even the bald and bespectacled Mr. Nordwind isn't exactly Justin Timberlake) and surprisingly competent. Overseen by Mr. Kulash's sister, a professional ballroom dancer, it took a week to choreograph and practice. We didn't originally conceive of it as a music video proper, Mr. Kulash said. It was supposed to be a routine to finish live shows, and this was just a document of us practicing.

Encouraged by their friends, though, Mr. Kulash and his band mates began handing out DVD's of the video at their concerts. As fans uploaded and swapped it, A Million Ways generated an online following, ultimately entering the pantheon of eagerly forwarded viral videos -- a category usually reserved for clips of President Bush mispronouncing words and overweight people falling into holes. By August, it was the most downloaded video at the popular Web sites myspace.com and iFilm.com. A publicist for Capitol, the band's label, said it has been downloaded more than a million times in all.

Capitol decided to release the video officially, and it's currently in rotation on MTV2. Last month the band performed the routine on the season premiere of Fox's Mad TV. We were going to do it on 'The Tonight Show' too, Mr. Kulash said, but they have a strict 'no lip-syncing' policy.

For Mr. Kulash, the video's Internet-bred success presents a strange paradox: it's the type of buzz major labels dream about, but it's also a sign that major-label publicity channels have become outmoded. This massive machine that used to shove music down people's throats has imploded, and nothing much has replaced it, he said. Still, Capitol certainly couldn't have minded the video's budget. It cost $4.99 to make -- $20, according to Mr. Kulash, if one counts beverages for the cast and crew.

Literally citation from "The New York Times" (2005)

Structure

• Introduction (Narrative)

Description of the Shift from content consumption to content creation

• What is user generated content?

Definitions, Characteristics, separations, forms of UCC/examples, shades of creativity incl. copy right, Jatalla

• Reasons/Drivers for the phenomenon of digital creativity

Technological Drivers

Social Drivers

Economic Drivers

Legal/Institutional Drivers

• The business with digital creativity

The case of YouTube, Grouper, etc.

• Future

Prognosis for future relevance/importance of digital creativity, future scenarios Impacts on education, social life, business architectures Opportunities and Threats (transition to III.B. Digital Piracy)

Relevant Research

Primary Sources

UCC Report

Yochai Benkler: The Wealth of Networks

Wikipedia

The Guardian

Study finds Podcast use rising but small

Communication Tools and Teens, p. 14 ff.

Pew Internet Project, Generations Memo (US) (2005)

technolocigal and social context, p. 9 ff.

Emerging trends among primary school children's use of the internet (UK) (2004) [Chat&IM, P2P]

Content Creation Report (2004)

The Guardian (2006): Whose content is it anyway? [question of ownership, who gets the money?]

Pew Report: Teens and Technology (2005)[How teens use IM, personal expression, et seq.]

2007 Digital Future Report: Data on broadband at home, the wireless Internet, on-line media, user-generated content and, social networking (2006)

The Guardian: Digination - Research on our digital behavior (2006)

Social Tagging Panel (based on a dissertation on del.icio.us) & Session Notes

UGC Generator Motivation Study (2006)

Secondary Sources

Deutschsprachige Wikipedia - 500'000 Artikel überschritten

Interview with T. Berners-Lee: Online life will produce more creative children (2006)

Various articles about cyber psychology, incl. topics about friend networking sites (NL)

Siliconvalley.com: Police track reckless driver on youtube (police pursuit in cyberspace, fine of $1'300)

The Register: Second life equal with first life (2006)

NZZ: Die Festplatte ist überall voll, das Internet als omnipräsenter Speicher für persönliche Daten (2006), Datenschutz, Software für UCC, etc.

NZZ: Jeder ein TV-Mitarbeiter (2006)

The Guardian: We really need some discontent creators (2006) (about youtube, the future of creativity, etc.)

Siliconvalley.com: As online viewing booms, the amateurs give way to big media (2006)

Who owns the money? (2006)DIY Media Blog

NYTimes: Web Content by and for the Mass