2 thoughts on “lonelygirl15’s not over!”

1. September 15, 2006 22:44

   JoseAngel

   William Gibson must be quietly laughing to himself… he predicted (or detected) suchlike phenomena in PATTERN RECOGNITION.

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2. September 16, 2006 14:10

   Jill

   He is – he even noted the similarity in his blog! There are some differences though, as Jane McGonigal pointed out in a comment responding on danah boyd’s post on the lonleygirl15 phenomenon:

   I’d hardly say that this project was ripping off Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. For starters, Pattern Recongition was drawing largely on existing alternate reality game culture in describing the film strip mystery. Gibson didn’t invent a fictional entertainment form that Lonelygirl brought to life– Gibson was writing about and from interviews I’ve read directly inspired by the real-world emerging entertainment forms, like the ARG phenomenon. Indeed, the straightforward narrative videos of lonelygirl bear little in common with the completely deconstructed and inscrutable Pattern Recognition blips and stills. So it seems of little use to say that lonelygirl is derived largely from Gibson’s concept, when it clearly has a very different aesthetic and moreover is definitely bubbling up out of a larger, immersive, distributed storytelling culture that goes far beyond and deeper than Gibson’s fictive game.

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