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lonelygirl15’s not over!

Jill2 Comments

Ooh, a new lonelygirl15 video! I’m so glad they’re still posting them, despite the videos being revealed as fiction. Unfortunately the comments are extremely mean-spirited, as Jane pointed out yesterday. I wish I had twenty or so people who could code each of the 30-40000 comments on the lonelygirl videos and a statistician to analyse how the comments have changed with the channel’s increasing popularity, its mentions in mainstream media and the fuss about its being fake.

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2 thoughts on “lonelygirl15’s not over!”

  1. JoseAngel

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

  2. 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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