Bob Garfield respectfully rejects the ugly terms “user-generated video,” “citizen video,” and “vlogging” and proposes that from now on, we call it “Monkeyvision.”
Yeah, Hollywood is good at what it does. The creative elite — through their own wit, cunning and extraordinary good luck — get to the top and determine the entertainment options for the entire world. And because they control manufacturing and distribution, nobody has been able to topple them. No problem. Their entertainment is very entertaining.
But wait. Cheap digital tools and the internet have opened up manufacturing and distribution to almost everyone. (See YouTube for the evidence. ) Oh, sure, 99% of the stuff sucks, but if you put a million monkeys at a million videocams…. The genius of YouTube is that it taps the creative genius of the entire modern world, and Hollywood simply can’t compete with that. In fact, unlike Waterworld, Gigli, Heaven’s Gate, Bonfire of the Vanities and Ishtar, even the soaring terribleness of user generated video can be irresistible.
I was just writing my spiel for Jeff Pulver’s Video on the Net conference next week in Boston and I took to calling our television “televox.” Probably won’t stick. But it’s fun throwing things against the wall and watching them go splat.
Here are my notes for that spiel. If you have any comments before I spin it Tuesday morning, please leave them here.
: What do you call a herd of monkeys, then? A meetup of video bloggers at WKRN in Nashville. Damn, wish I’d been there; sounds like illuminating fun. LostRemote has many posts.
: Speaking of video making some people feel like monkeys: I’ve been crazed the last few days writing aforesaid spiel, and so I haven’t been around here to enjoy the hubub over the outing — well, just a toe out under the closet door — of Lonelygirl15. Whats’ wonderful is to watch the creativity spawned around this: art as a conversation. See, for example: the LonelyGirl song; the LonelyGirl press conference; the kinda scary jilted LonelyGirl LonelyGuy; and, just to make Garfield happy, a LonelyGirl15 video by MonkeyFemme.
