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May, 2010

  1. Anatomy of a Viral Video: Smoking Baby

    May 29, 2010 by Earnest Pettie


    Smoking Baby Hooked on Cigarettes – Watch more Funny Videos

    This was a great week for viral videos. There were at least three massive videos, including a coughing, farting cat. But the one video that trumped all others was Two-Year Old Toddler Smokes Cigarettes. It’s done over two million views on Break.com, alone, and it is most likely the the new record holder for Break’s most shared video ever on Facebook. At the time of this posting, the video has been shared 96 Thousand times. That is huge.

    So what happens in this video to make it so viral? Well, almost nothing. A rotund Indonesian kid named Ardi Rizal is sitting with his family, the camera trained on him, as he smokes a cigarette.  It is that almost nothing is happening that is part of what is so stunning about this video. If a toddler were smoking cigarettes at a family gathering in America, the Surgeon General would descend on the event from a black helicopter and taze the parents, stickering their foreheads with the Surgeon General’s warning for cigarettes. In this video, it is just another day. That gives the video the awe factor necessary to send it soaring into a viral orbit, but there’s another propellant the video has, and that is the WTF quotient.

    The WTF quotient is the part of the viral video that makes your brain tingle. You know that what you’re looking at is strange, and you just can’t seem to wrap your brain around the image and make it make sense. In this video, the baby’s smoking is weird, but it isn’t really WTF. That’s just what we perceive to be bad parenting. No, the WTF part is the gusto with which this kid puffs on his cigarettes. Seriously, it looks like the ghosts of Joan Crawford and Humphrey Bogart must’ve materialized just long enough to teach this kid how to puff on cigarettes with the glamour of a star of the silver screen.  He twirls his cigarette, looks at it, waves it around. He makes smoking look cooler than it has looked in decades! Honestly, this kid could be the new Joe Camel.

    It seems this video was born to be viral in much the same way that kid was born to smoke.  People who think the video is funny will pass it around, and so will people who find the video shocking. There really is no emotional response you can have that would keep you from showing it to everyone you know.  Two Year Old Toddler, folks, is an instant classic.

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  2. The Lost Finale or Why I’m Right And Everyone Else Is Wrong

    May 25, 2010 by Earnest Pettie

    The simplest lessons are often the best, and one of the simplest lessons I’ve ever received is this: Film is an audio-visual medium. It seems so obvious that it shouldn’t even be worth mentioning, but it bears repeating because it’s important to remember that what you see and what you hear are important in film. The trick of narrative film is to make all the amalgamated elements of filmmaking–the photography, the sound recording, the editing, the acting–disappear into a story. The bigger trick of narrative film is to use those elements to tell the story for you, and that is something at which the creators of Lost were adept.

    Audio-visually, the clues were there all along that this season was markedly different from the previous seasons, and it all began with the negative image of the Lost bumper at the close of last season after Juliette exploded the bomb. When we returned for this season, we had a new storyline, something that appeared to be a divergent continuum, and the first time we experienced what appeared to be an alternate reality, we were transitioned between the alternate reality and the regular Lost reality without the audio cue that we’d come to expect from flashes back and flashes forward. I remind you of these things to help you understand that our storytellers understand how to use the medium to give added depth to their narrative.

    I believe Lost had two endings. One ending wraps up the narrative of the survivors’ struggle for existence on the island, and the other ending is the ending to Lost, the series. For six seasons, we’ve watched as the survivors of Oceanic 815 struggled to build a community with each other in order to survive the horrors of the island as they battled polar bears, smoke monsters, Others, and even each other. The end of that story is that ultimately they did find that community and were able to enjoy it in death. The other ending is the actual conclusion to Lost. If you’ll bear with me, I’d like to flash us forward to the closing moments of the show and a sequence of very important images.

    In these six images we see Jack crumbled on the Earth, bleeding to death, joined by Walt’s dog. From there we cut to the purgatory Church where all the survivors have reunited with their loves lost and friends found, where Jack and Kate finally get to be together. We cut back to the corporeal Jack, bleeding to death, happy as he sees Kate, Sawyer, and company fly away from the island. We return to the church, again, this time bringing closure to the Lost survivors’ narrative. We now can be sure that the church is their heaven and that Kate, Sawyer, Lapidus, and Miles survived the island and made it back to the real world. From here we get a transition that we have not gotten before, and that is a fade to white and a fade back to Jack. This time, however, the shot has changed. We are not looking at Jack’s body or head– instead we get his eye. This is a callback to the pilot, where we saw Jack’s eye open, which launched us into this grand adventure. Jack’s eye closes.  As I mentioned, the transition that precedes this shot is significant because the previous transitions have all been cuts, which is how the show’s creators move us back and forth between the island and the alternate/purgatory stories. As we move to the eye, then, we are not returning to Jack’s body on the island. Instead we are returning to Jack’s real body on the island, the body that has survived for probably just moments, the wreckage of Oceanic 815. That eye that opened is now closing, and Jack, like everyone else, is dead. We go to the Lost bumper, and then an image of the flight’s wreckage over the show’s closing credits, which serves to underscore that everyone who crashed on that plane is dead.

    Narratively, the show’s creators have had their cake and eaten it, too. Yes, while everyone on the island is dead, none of them were dead in the story we were given. Yes, the island’s survivors did end up in purgatory, but the purgatory wasn’t the island, it was one of our characters’ own making (which is fodder for an entirely separate post regarding the amalgam of religious ideas in Lost). For the purposes of our story, all of this did happen, and all of it was important, even if none of it actually happened and existed only in the desperate fantasy of a man about to die. This isn’t “it was all a dream.” It is “it was all a desperate delusion,” and it doesn’t matter that it was because we were given a meaty story with adequate closure and a fitting conclusion: Smoke monsters and Jacob don’t exist, but our struggles, before we die, to ascertain the nature of this world, why evil exists, and why we haven’t been better people do exist.

    Edit 4/25 10:43 pm– In the comments and on Twitter people have pointed out that the last image of the wreckage was added by the network. I would argue that it’s the use of a a different transition to take us to Jack’s closing eye that is meaningful.  Take away that last shot, and you still have the show’s creators taking us back to Jack’s eye closing after the crash.

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  3. American Idol In Decline? Yes, Of Course It Is.

    May 22, 2010 by Earnest Pettie

    photo by Flickr's Vagueonthehow

    First American Idol, Kelly Clarkson from Flickr's Vagueonthehow

    Ratings are down 10% for American Idol this year, text messages are off by about half, compared to this same time last season, and the cast has been in flux for two years now. American Idol is, without a doubt, in decline. There’s almost nothing American Idol could have done to prevent this. You see, American Idol’s problem isn’t that it’s any worse a show than it was last season or even nine seasons ago. It’s that the world has changed around American Idol, and now American Idol has become increasingly irrelevant. When American Idol began its Nielsen-dominating run at the beginning of this decade, reality TV as we would come to know it was still in its infancy, Friendster was the only social network people had ever heard of, and record companies had been shoving pop groups and stars down our gullets for years. American Idol was supposed to be the remedy to the latter. The television audience would determine its own pop stars through a months-long gauntlet of singing competitions. The winner would, by definition, be a viable pop star because the audience would have already demonstrated its preference for the singer.

    It’s fun to go back and look at those early episodes. All the contestants are dressed like what they think pop stars are supposed to dress like, wearing clothes that none of today’s contestants would be caught dead in. It really was a different era. Kelly Clarkson won that season and was considered a success by all measures and wouldn’t be topped until Carrie Underwood won the contest in 2005. The 2005 season represents kind of a high watermark for the show because the audience for the show was reaching its peak and Carrie Underwood was the last American Idol winner to make real waves in the music industry. It was also the last year that it was possible for Idol to be Idol.

    2005 saw the explosion of Myspace and the birth of Youtube, two tools that would inevitably change the music industry and replace American Idol as the avenue Average Joes took to becoming pop stars. Need proof? The elimination episode of this year’s semifinals featured Justin Bieber, who owed his enormous popularity to Youtube videos, and the other performer on the show, Travis Garland, made his name through Myspace. Now, what seemed like a unique concept– that anyone could be a star without having to rely on the traditional route to stardom– is our everyday reality. In fact, we learned long ago that the winners of American Idol weren’t the only contestants who would receive recording contracts, so not only is the premise of the show no longer unique, the prize isn’t either. The audience, rather than choosing one contestant to make a star, has become a focus group for twelve musicians.

    The music business isn’t the only thing that has changed since Idol began. Reality TV has grown by leaps and bounds, so much so that by 2005, the airwaves were quickly filling up with reality TV programs. What this infusion of reality TV programming did was make stars of regular people and make stars seem like regular people. Reality TV collapsed the allure of stardom, and aspiration to stardom was something that American Idol was built on.

    So the world around American Idol has changed greatly since the show debuted a decade ago. What does American Idol have left to offer that hasn’t been usurped by reality TV and the internet? For a long time, what American Idol had to offer was a strange interplay between the bratty but professional Ryan Seacrest, the enthusiastic Randy Jackson, the ever-loopy Paula Abdul, and the schoolmaster Simon Cowell. But even that has changed. Ellen Degeneres replaced Paula Abdul, Kara DioGuardi slid in between Randy and Simon, and Simon has one foot out the door. Everything the show had to offer has dissipated, and all that we, the audience, are left with is the hope that we might tune in and see something special that reminds us of why we watched the show in the first place.  In short, American Idol is the superstar that has become a nostalgia act without even knowing it. Sadly, the show that was to allow us to pick the next Britney Spears has become Britney Spears.

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  4. Anatomy of a Viral Video: Weird Russian Audition For Fish Ad

    May 21, 2010 by Earnest Pettie


    Weird Russian Audition For Fish Ad – Watch more Funny Videos
    The one thing that determines whether a video will be viral or not is whether after watching it, your jaw has dropped. It doesn’t matter why your jaw will have fallen open– it could be from laughter, shock, awe, or even anger. All that matters is that you have to see it again to be sure of whatever it is you’ve just seen. I had that experience with this screen test video. Upon watching it, I was filled with such a sense of WTF that I fell in love instantly.

    The set-up is simple, right? A Russian-sounding guy is auditioning for a commercial. There is nothing out of the ordinary about that, but every other aspect of this ad is extraordinary. Let’s start with this guy’s outfit. He’s auditioning for a role as what seems like the Gorton’s fisherman, but he’s dressed more like The Undertaker.  Is Paul Bearer his agent? He’s reading for this commercial, but it sounds like he’s never seen the script before– like he just happened in on the way to the bathroom and decided “What the heck? Today, I’m an actor. What a country!” The best part, though, is that there are these key phrases that he hits that would sound like regular advertising copy if it had been read by anyone but this dude. “Specialty seasonings.” I want him to sell everything.

    It’s such a simple set-up, and that’s what allows it to be so amazing.

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  5. Reining In My Online Self or How I Learned To Stop Chatting And Love The Web

    May 5, 2010 by Earnest Pettie

    Too many networks!

    Photo By Docklandsboy

    One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to admit to myself was that I was spread too thin. I had too many accounts with too many different online services. For years, I wore all those accounts as a badge of honor. I felt proud that I’d forgotten usernames to more accounts than most people had ever logged into. Over the past year, though, the attention I was spending being connected to all these different services had taken its toll on my ability to be productive. This was especially problematic since my job required me to be connected to the web all day, unlike most people’s jobs, which often do their best to keep their employees from scrounging around online. I needed to cut back.

    Let me illustrate the problem for you. I had seven different services hosting photos. I’d used three of them in the past two years, often duplicating my uploads to Flickr, Facebook, and Picasa. Sure I had my reasons for maintaining the separate accounts: Flickr was cool, Picasaweb had tons of free storage, and Facebook was the service everyone I knew used. Uploading photos to all those services was a waste of time and effort, and last weekend, took the bold step of deleting my Flickr accounts and vowing not to use Facebook as my photo hosting service, sticking only to Google’s Picasa.

    What was going on with my photo hosting services was indicative of what had become of my whole online existence. Email addresses upon email addresses, superfluous IM accounts, and long-outdated social networking profiles had dilluted my online existence, making it too difficult to actually optimize my usage of any of them. I needed to act. My first goal was to pare my social networking profiles to the vital few I actually used: I saved Facebook, Linkedin, and Myspace (I use it for music), and I cut every other social network I’d joined in the past seven years, finally divesting myself of Friendster and scores of other services you don’t remember. That felt great, but it didn’t do much to alleviate my major problem which was that my attention was being pulled between too many things when I was online. I needed to go deeper. I needed to cut E-mail accounts and IM accounts.

    Cutting IM And Email accounts was a little more difficult than I’d imagined it would be– mainly because the two are so intertwined. I wanted to delete my Netscape/Aol account, but the company I work for used AIM as their primary IM service. That left three other major Email and/or IM services that were always tugging at the edges of my field of vision: Google, Yahoo, and Facebook. I was always logged into all those accounts simultaneously (with Twitter, too) through my chat client, Digsby. As a result, I was always seeing status updates, people coming and going, and new chat boxes opening. I had no choice but to make cuts. For me, Yahoo was an easy decision. I’d long since stopped using Yahoo for anything important, and since I’d killed my Flickr account, I no longer needed the Yahoo login. It was cut. That left Google and Facebook. I couldn’t get rid of Facebook, but I could log myself out of Facebook chat and never log back in. After all, did I really need to talk to the guy who rode my bus in third grade and was interested in reconnecting? Probably not. Unless he still had those cool toys. I slammed the door on Facebook chat, leaving me access only to Google Talk and AIM with occasional Twitter updates.

    Those cuts returned to me a full hour of work time. I was no longer logging into a million different sites throughout the day, chatting with a million people, or being distracted by status updates every couple of minutes.

    I’m happier now that I’m not checking in on a million different accounts. I think there’s another benefit that I’ve gained from this exercise, which is that my online identity is more concrete. If someone wants to contact me, or if they are searching for me online, there are fewer options– more importanly, fewer bad options– for them to try. If someone wants to see my photos, there is one place. If someone wants to see my resume, there is one place. If they want to email me, there are still a few options because I maintain a work, private, and professional (for writing) e-mail addresses, but they should be far less likely to email me at an address that I simply never check.  Another unintended consequence is that I have more time to enjoy the web. I can spend more time reading blogs and exploring new sites because I’m not keeping up with all the sites/accounts/and emails that were anchoring me down before.

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