Inspiring Narratives from a Culture of Participation
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 video 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 attention. 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 organisations. 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."
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."
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 Californiaâs 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 motherâs side. Throughout her childhood and adolescence, Ryan harbored escape fantasies involving the Hollywood of her parentsâ and grandparentsâ 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 âtoo right-brain for school,â 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.
âDamn, this shit is heavy,â Loca said, in a pronounced Hispanic accent, after accepting the gold statuette and waving it around. âI could knock somebody out with this.â Then she launched into an earnest acceptance speech. âI want to thank YouTube,â she said. âYouâre so important in my life right now. And without YouTube thereâs no way in hell Loca could have, you know, got something like this.â
In fact, YouTube helped Ryan to real fame. Over the previous three months, Locaâs 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 âLittle Loca from YouTubeâ. She also was now being represented by a Hollywood agency. âSeriously, if you Googled me, like, a couple months ago, you wouldnât get crap,â she said, typing her name into the search engine. âIâm just a normal person. And now you actually get stuff. Itâs, like, crazy. Thatâs more than I could ever ask for, just to be on Google.â The search led to a fan site for various celebrities; Stevie Ryanâs 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 siteâs 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. âItâs basically all I do,â 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. âFour months ago, when I was first on YouTube, it was not where itâs at right now,â she says. âI think Little Loca was, like, No. 5 most-subscribed, and now, like, Iâm No. 15 - because why? Thereâs all these other people theyâre featuring on there. And itâs, like, bullshit.â
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 "featureâ her the way they had featured Peter the geriatric. âO.K., seriously? They do not like me on here,â she said. âThey hate my guts. Iâve never been featured, so I donât watch the featured videos now. Iâm really angry at YouTube. I donât care what anybody says, theyâre doing it on purpose. I have written probably like, I donât 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 Ryanâs suspicions. âThey removed my video because YouTube always removes my videosâ.
The real reason for her videoâs 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, Ryanâs 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), partially 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)
Narrative 6: Yusuf and Bahutan, Two Rapping Boys from Turkey
What do you do when you want to learn to play an instrument, but your school music room doesnât have the funds to buy them? Well, if youâre a digital native, the answer is easy: make a creative plea on YouTube.
Yusuf and Batuhan, two boys from Van, an rural part of Turkey, wanted to raise funds to improve the music room at their school. And so, they decided to ask using the instruments they had - one desk and two voices - and post their song to YouTube.
Not only are Yusef and Batuhan talented musicians, but theyâre also two very smart kids. In effort to get as much attention as possible, they decided to rap and drum - surprising the country at what two rural Van boys can do (it would be ordinary to see boys from Istanbul doing such a performance). Not only do Yusef and Batuhan rap and drum, and do it well, but they rap about math!
The math song video made these two Van boys so famous, they were invited to appear on a program with a famous Turkish TV host.
In this video Batuhan and Yusef perform an anti-drinking and anti-smoking song. At the end, one of the boys makes a (very) public plea to his father to quit smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, and they top it all off by a request for musical instruments for their school.
Yusef and Batuhan, two digital natives from rural Turkey, show us the power of growing up in a world with lowered barriers to creativity and participation, and with a different understanding of oneâs relationship in and to the world . Batuhan and Yusef have a voice they know will be heard - and they take full advantage of this.
Adapted from a Digital Natives blog post
Community Narrative: Helping Strangers
In Marion, a small town in southern Illinois with the slogan "Hub of the Universe," 58-year-old Richard Marchal spends four to six hours a day answering questions from strangers.
"What is the acid produced by bacteria on our teeth?"
"Would the density of water differ if it had a dissolved solid in it?"
"What should I do about a crush?"
"Is camping a fun family activity?"
Marchal has answered more than 6,400 such questions in little more than a year. He's the top-rated answerer on Yahoo Answers, a Web site where people pose questions and hope that strangers will answer them. His reward: the gratitude of the asker, if he's lucky. Oh, and Yahoo gives him "points," which serve no purpose but to rank him among other users.
"This way here I can be grandpa to hundreds," Marchal said. "A lot of people tell me this is the best advice they ever got."
Helping strangers for no tangible reward is a huge phenomenon online -- huge enough to have repercussions for the largest businesses. Yahoo sells ads on Answers, where visitors do most of the work, while other companies gratefully let volunteers provide online technical support.
Literally citation from Business Week: Online, helping strangers is huge (2007)
Community Narrative: Miss Norway
Karyn logged onto LegendMUD, a text-based virtual world, for the first time in 1996. Being the sort of person who makes friends easily, a law student from Oslo, and a former Miss Norway, she quickly became a popular character in the virtual community. It's painful to read the details of her life, knowing that it was about to come to an abrupt and tragic end. In 1998, Karyn and a friend were out test-driving a Porsche 911 and collied head-on with an other car. Karyn and her friend were killed immediately. Or was she? Karyn's death would soon become a cause célèbre in virtual world circles.
After a couple of weeks, the virtual community realized that Karyn was missing. E-mails were sent out, but she did not reply. Some friends decided to investigate and what they found shocked the community to its core. Posted on Karyn's home page was a newspaper article reporting her death and a letter from her parents. When the news of Karyn's death finally reached LegendMUD, the outpouring of grief was immediate and heartfelt. The message boards in every tavern quickly overflowed with expressions of sorrow. In response to player requests, the immortals decided to construct a "Garden of Rememberance" to honor Karyn's memory...
Shortened version from "Who killed Miss Norway?", partially edited