SCAN: TRANSMEDIA STORIES
ENTRY POINT
"It’s the birth of WikiTV: a television show created by a broad community of participants and built not of sequential, hour-long episodes, but of two- minute interconnected parcels. The story line is both linear (will Daniel get the girl?) and expansive (enter the Mirrored Cowboy!), and anyone can join in. ... And maybe this, and not some NBC shows for sale on iTunes, is the future of television—or the promised land of a new narrative form."
--Adam Sternberg, New York Magazine
In June 2006, a young woman who identified herself as Lonelygirl15 posted a two-minute video on YouTube. She was a "a suspiciously photogenic teen who films first-person confessionals in her bedroom, detailing the dramas of her so-called life" (Sternberg, New York Magazine).
Lonelygirl15 created a wave, then caught it: "It couldn't exist without the explosion of broadband and the advent of YouTube – and partly by the appeal of a hybrid form of storytelling. Lonelygirl15 is a mashup of homemade video diary, soap opera, and mysterious, hint-laden narrative like Lost. It's all the more engrossing because viewers can correspond with the characters and even affect the plot” (Joshua Davis, "The Secret World of Lonely Girl", Wired Magazine).
Nearly a million YouTube viewers caught her moments of confession, angst and resilience. A seemingly authentic soul became spokeswoman for the internet era. Then, in September 2006, The New York Times broke the real story. Lonelygirl was an actor: Jessica Rose, recently graduated from Universal Studio's film school and looking for a gig. The piece was cleverly written, directed and produced by two guys, Mesh Flinders and Miles Beckett--in response to audience feedback via postings to YouTube and emails to Lonelygirl15.
"It hadn't taken them long to figure out, by trial and error, what worked in this new genre. Viewers wanted family and relationship drama mixed with a rich, mysterious backstory that could be explored and debated. …In response to the feedback, Beckett and Flinders decided to focus on the tension between Bree and Daniel. When viewers suggested that he had a crush on Bree, they changed the story line to include a romance. That couldn't have happened on television. A conventional TV episode airs once at a certain time; even if it's great, it can only serve to attract viewers to future episodes. On YouTube, a video can be streamed at any time. The good ones are watched again and again, sending a clear message about what works and what doesn't. When "My Parents Suck …" broke 500,000 views, Beckett and Flinders realized this wasn't just an experiment or a setup for a film. It was a medium in its own right." (Joshua Davis, "The Secret World of Lonely Girl", Wired Magazine)
Viewers continued to be interested in what was now "the property." Lonelygirl became its own site (www.LG15.com).
Lonelygirl15 satisfied one of the most universal of human needs: the need to make sense of the world and our lives through stories. And it did so through an unprecedented innovation in trans-media storytelling: DIY video postings “retold” through audience blog entries taken up by the writers who made them into new plot twists in what became a regularly appearing webisode which was then rerun through a dedicated website and covered by countless media reports and features. Henry Jenkins pondered the significance of Lonelygirl15 as story in a blog entry entitled: “Astroturf, Humbugs, and Lonely Girls.”
