I Am User Generated

Everything is a Remix Part 2 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

(Watch the above video before reading on or at least the first few seconds.)
This topic of remix culture and storytelling has been dear to my heart since I wrote my masters on the subject but what concerns me now that I’ve been working in between film and interactive is that us internet kids don’t have the respect we should for the work that has come before us in our field. We’ll bite technology thanks to open-source software but technology is only half of the story, we still need the story, the narrative, the emotional connection.

In early days of cinema we had the same issue. When the moving picture camera was invented early filmmakers simply shot things that were moving. An oncoming train was super exciting because we hadn’t seen a moving image before projected on the screen. This was a crazy new technology but there was no story there. The auteurs that really moved filmmaking forward are the ones that understood the technology and the storytelling. Or should I say they borrowed both technology and story. Star Wars is such a simple classic story that was borrowed from hundreds of works before it but it applied new technology with a universal story and the rest is cinema history. Godard borrowed all his story from Hollywood but shot in a totally different style given the technology that he had access to. This made him the genius auteur that he is, among other things.

So as internet kids now making stories, for the web, for the mobile, for media projections, how can we stand on the shoulder of these giants? We can tell simple universal stories with our new technology. We can’t keep just experimenting with the technology. Technology is moving so quickly that we could spend our whole life experimenting, testing, optimizing. We have to jump in and use what we have or invent the technology to tell our story.

But again the story has to be simple and well told. My beef with “transmedia” storytelling is that the story and the technology are both so deep and complicated. There are multiple characters, over multiple universes, over multiple platforms, spanning four generations and 18 countries using five different types of media. I’m lost before I even begin. Remember Star Wars. Simple story, ground breaking technology.

When I watch Everything is a Remix I see how our modern filmmakers were students of cinema and were humble enough to know that they needed to borrow from the filmmakers before them. In our wild west interactive technology landscape I see too much arrogance that we are pioneers inventing everything from scratch. This arrogance will only slow down our gestation. Let’s learn from previous storytellers who use technology to tell our stories with our technology.

I have the utmost respect for what Banksy has been able to do with legitimizing graffiti as a valid form of contemporary art, however he may have met his match or perhaps his greatest collaborator in Grey Ghost.

In Murketing today Rob Walker published a post about the anti-graf zealot Fred Radtke aka Grey Ghost. Radtke is well known in the graffiti scene in New Orleans for covering up graffiti. These square blocks of neutral color have become tags unto themselves. This is further evidenced when Grey Ghost only partially covered up a Banksy N.O. work. If he truly hated graffiti then he would have covered everything. Instead he has put his story touch on this tale and entered into dialogue with Banksy. 

As I Am User Generated regular reader’s will know, I’m keenly interested in one’s own ability to create their own celebrity online.  Now there is a tool for gauging our celebrity, or at least our own obsession with our own celebrity. Vanity Validator is a tool that Chris Anderson developed which use’s Google’s Page Rank to calculate anyone’s online presence. I’m happy to report that I score a healthy 62 out of a possible 100.

The Aesthetic Poetic and myself have been talking a lot about how the larger Internet community perceive us and the content we produce.

Wordle is a great visualization tool that helps in this quest as in scraps URLs for keywords then visualizes them. This word cloud can be seen as a visualization of how I am being perceived over at JamesChutter.com

As a small child I remember being in church and the pastor explaining if you were truly pure then you could walk around with loudspeakers hooked up to your thoughts. Even then this notion scared me. There was no way that I could handle having my thoughts broadcast 24/7.

Well here we are in a Web 2.0 world where blogs and social networks are growing exponentially. More and more tools are being developed to help us broadcast our personal life. Is this making us more pure?

Workers are being hired and fired based on their Myspace pages. Lying about a sick day is a lot harder with GPS cell phone tracking. Cheating on your lover is a dangerous tight-rope walk with friends of friends being a lot closer to each other. Flickr allows anyone to broadcast their photos and if you happen to be in a Tahiti shot when you said you were on business in Toronto then you’re in big trouble.

With more of our personal life being more and more traceable we are forced to be just that much more transparent. Corporations are learning the hard way that they have to be totally forth coming because the access to information is just that much more pervasive.

There has been plenty written on self-representation on social networks, but as we feed more and more content into social networks and our friends add comments, photos, videos about our lives we begin to lose our agency to falsely represent ourselves and are forced to live a pure, honest and transparent online existence.