KEY POINTS:
I've just watched the finale in the Lonelygirl15 internet video series that started out on Youtube, gathered a massive following and then found a home and a more slick look on Myspace.com.
The final episode is all floating camera work and soft-focus ferris wheel lights on what looks like Santa Monica pier. Bree (played by kiwi actor Jessica Lee Rose) doesn't appear in the final episode but her friend listens to a voicemail message sent by her to his mobile phone, a message from beyond the grave. I haven't followed the story closely or watched any other episodes, but it seems Bree met with a nasty end at the hands of members of a radical cult who wanted to extract her blood.
Anyway, 120,000 people have so far watched the last episode, not bad for a two minute short shot on a digital camera on what was probably a shoe-string budget. And so ends a chapter in internet history.
Rose and her film maker partners deserve credit for creating such a new media sensation, even if they weren't initially straight up in telling Youtube viewers that the videos were pure fiction rather than the real life video blog of a lonely 16 year old girl. The stunt will no doubt set Jessica Lee Rose on the way to more conventional movie stardom - she has after all, got real talent.
So what next? Sure, there's already the Lonelygirl15 spin-off called Kate Modern , which is being funded by the social networking website Bebo.com. But will aspiring film makers seek to emulate Longlygirl15's success, using the web to distribute videos and manipulate their audience into thinking its real? Are we forever going to be questioning the authenticity of seemingly slice-of-life blogs and vide blogs due to the Lonelygirl15 effect. Yes, probably. Can we really believe anything we read or see on the web?
Not really, says Andrew Keen, whose book The Cult of the Amateur, I read over the weekend.
"The question of the authenticity of the video became the story itself," writes Keen of Lonelygirl 15.
"Meanwhile the audience grew and grew and lonelygirl15 became Youtube's second-most-subscribed channel. None of her hundreds of thousands of viewers seemed to care whether they were watching sophisticated advertising or the musings of an angst-ridden teenager."
But it was just entertainment, wasn't it. Shouldn't we treat everything we come across on Youtube as simply that, entertainment? Keen can't stomach the inherent duplicity in the project.
"If we can't trust the authenticity of Bree's confessions - if her teenage angst is all a sham, then we've simply been hoodwinked. And it makes me wonder what else on Youtube, or in the blogosphere, is fiction or advertisement."
And what of the Sprint logo on the mobile handset that the camera glances over several times in the finale of Lonelygirl15? Is the whole thing an ad for Sprint? Who knows. Who cares really? Conventional movies are loaded with product placements as well, why should internet dramas be any different? I'd like to see more short, episodic dramas in the vein of Lonelygirl15. I've little time to sit down each week to watch TV shows, so two to three minute internet episodes suit be nicely. But I pity those who seek to go out and use the web to present factual material, documentaries and the like. They might find that the general public will take a little more convincing in the wake of our lonely girl's passing.
