lonelygirl15: YouTube's first viral sensation/fakery
https://www.youtube.com/embed/-goXKtd6cPo
Background: "In June 2006, a 16-year-old girl began a video blog on YouTube. https://folksonomy.simonperkins.co.uk/?keyword=2230 Her name was Bree, she'd been lurking in the burgeoning community for a while. She was a self-described dork, she thought her hometown was really boring – 'Maybe that's why I spend so much time on my computer …' Bree was one of a slowly-growing community on YouTube of confessional video bloggers. They poured their lives into their webcams, not yet an automatic feature on laptops as they are today. Their follower bases grew slowly but steadily, with regular, and often grainy, videos about their day-to-day lives. They were largely ignored by the mainstream media, who at the time dismissed YouTube as just a repository for cat videos. Lonelygirl15 https://www.youtube.com/@lonelygirl15 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonelygirl15 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1039793/ changed all that. Her followers quickly ballooned and she became one of the young site's most popular stars. The New York Times had a recurring blog about her. She had her own forum. Hundreds of people wanted to be her friend on Myspace. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace The thing is, Bree wasn't real. Lonelygirl15 actually had a small team of writers. Bree and her best friend Daniel were played by actors. YouTubers and the media had been duped. Yet this was no mere flash in the pan hoax – this was YouTube's first web series. This was the first time someone proved you could actually make money on YouTube" (Cresci, E., 2016). More: Danielbeast' To Hell With Bree's Dad (yeah!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0k_khs02Dw Press: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnRM_UMufTQ&t=3s Discussion: "What spreads through a social network is all too often attributed to two largely uncontested logics of resemblance and repetition. First, cultural contagion is assumed to correspond to a distinctive biologically determined unit of imitation (the meme). This is unquestionably a mechanistic virality analogically compared to the canonical imprint of genetic code. Second, what spreads is said to occur in a representational space of collective contamination in which individual persons who become part of a crowd tend toward thinking in the same mental images (real and imagined). Like this, the reasoned individual is seemingly overpowered by a neurotic mental state of unity unique to the crowd, which renders subjectivity vulnerable to further symbolic contagious encounters and entrainments. ... As becomes apparent in Virality, Milgram's impact on the new network sciences approach to contagion has been considerable. Not only has his work greatly influenced the models used but his ideas figure writ large in the stress given to an individual's instinctual tendency to herd or cascade, particularly in times of bubble building and subsequent financial crisis but also during the spreading of fashion and fads. In many of these accounts, imitative decisions (rationale or irrational) conforming to the social actions of others are assumed to be biologically hardwired into the brain, enabling a person to make snap judgments to avoid, for example, threats to her physical, emotional, or financial well-being. Notably, even when using online systems like e-mail, it is argued that 'the human brain is hardwired with the proclivity to follow the lead of others'" (Sampson, T., 2012). Bibliography: Cresci, E. (2016, June 16). 'Lonelygirl15: how one mysterious vlogger changed the internet'. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/16/lonelygirl15-bree-video-blog-youtube Falconer, E. (2016, June 16). 'An oral history of lonelygirl15'. RNZ. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/the-wireless/374034/an-oral-history-of-lonelygirl15 Sampson, T. (2012, October 5). 'Images from Virality – future project with artists at UEL'. VIRALITY. https://viralcontagion.blog/2012/10/05/images-from-virality-future-project-with-artists-at-uel/
