the birth of a new art form

call me crazy, but I believe "The Creators" when, after the (apparent) revelation that Lonleygirl15 is not "real," they declared the birth of a new art form. In terms of medium specificity, I think they have a point (although its dopey to think of the Internet as a single medium at this point, as it fulfills so many different fuctions for so many different people) - one of the walls that the internet was destined to break down, along with the walls between public/private and public/celebrity, was the wall between fiction and realtiy.

I guess you could draw parellels to "War of Worlds" or "Quiz Show," mass media deceptions on a much larger scale. Like everything online, this only affects a minute portion of the public. But still, the same principles apply. And so we might think that, just as War of the Worlds was to radio and the quiz show that inspire the movie Quiz Show was to TV, this is to the Internet (or at least autobiographic blogging, vlogging, and podcasting). In other words, there comes a time in the evolution of any medium where the audience is forced to confront the fact that the medium can be used for mass deception. They are forced to become critical of it. Again, this only applies to aspects of the Internet (primarily those that ape aspects of "traditional media" like YouTube does to TV. But the same can be said about autobiographic blogs.

loneleygirl15 is real in the sense that the person who is on screen is almost certainly real, and she is real in the sense that the sentiments that she expresses, the motives that inform those sentiments, are both from another real person (or perhaps several real people) - the Creators. It is possible that The Creators is just a computer program that analyzes autobiographic blogs, pulls recurring themes, sentiments, and motives and weaves those into a story (unlikely considering how unsophisticated AI is rright now, but in principle, such a program, with minor human assistance, could exist soon).

Is lonelygirl15 any less real than the coached personalities on Laguna Beach? What if those personalities weren't coached? Would that, then, be real? By "real," I suppose we mean that the actions of a person are motivated by only them, and not other forces, or that at least those other forces pass through the filter of that person. It would be better if Bree was "real" in the sense that she, like the characters on Laguna Beach and the Hills, had a pre-existing life that was dicovered by producers and then shaped to suit dramatic needs. There could never be any definitive unmasking. There would never really be any lying. It would be impossible to fix the line between reality and fiction. They (or she) might have been coached, and her behavior might have been altered, but it is impossible to say to what degree and in what way.

We all put on some sort of a performance to garner attention, in our writings and our behavior. What makes us real?

So this is all some combination of Andy Kaufman and Andy Warhol. And at least for now, it feels new.