YouTube and Fiction

I have been fascinated by the furore over the YouTube videos of LonelyGirl15, which appeared to be the video diary of a beautiful young girl about her life and loves and which turned out to be a video fiction created by some Web filmmakers, complete with an online persona who responded to emails and comments.

Since the fiction was exposed, the series continues and fans still follow the show. You can watch one of the videos below:

You can go to LonelyGirl15’s YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=lonelygirl15

Wired magazine ran an in-depth investigative article - you can read the full article here.

As a storyteller/ fiction writer, I think this blending of reality and fiction is a terrific way to engage an audience and an innovative use of new technology. It brings to mind Orson Welles’s radio adaptation of “The War of the Worlds” that caused panic across America when listeners tuned in and thought they were listening to live reports of an alien invasion. I am also reminded of the spoof documentaries / mockumentaries “Spinal Tap”, “Best in Show” and last years “Confetti”.

In novels, especially in first person narratives, the intention is to draw the audience in to the life of the narrator as if it were a real life and as readers, we want to believe in the reality of the fiction. On TV at the moment, there is a seemingly unending thirst for reality TV - which is anything but: how real is the gimmicky set-up of putting people into a totally TV-created and -controlled environment and setting them gimmicky tests to perform? (I am not a fan at all of this form of entertainment… as you can probably guess). Yet, the fiction of LonelyGirl15 has a more real quality than those “reality” shows - probably because it was on YouTube: no-one would have believed it if it had been on TV because no ordinary person could get on TV in that same way. And even with the diarist being impossibly beautiful and extraordinarily articulate, the monologues being well-timed and clearly articulated, the production values being seriously high quality - all pointing to something more than a mere teenage girl in her bedroom - the millions who tuned in believed (wanted to believe?) that LonelyGirl was a real girl confessing all.