Wired 14.12: The Secret World of Lonelygirl - 0 views
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Beckett had met him through a friend and wanted to make sure Lonelygirl15 didn't get them sued for deceiving the public
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dracmere on 13 Feb 08This was a good idea on their part. It would be bad if they were successful and then got sued for something.
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Jessica Bloom on 16 Apr 08Is it even possible to get sued for deceiving the public? So many shows today are fake, do they have a problem as well?
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But the series he created shows that Internet TV has arrived. The phenomenon is partly driven by technology – Lonelygirl15 wouldn't exist without the explosion of broadband and the advent of YouTube – and partly by the appeal of a hybrid form of storytelling.
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I just find this kind of sick and twisted. I remember hearing about this a few months ago but didn't think much of it. But this type of fake story telling only shows people how easy to is to be fake by using technology and that is not right. It is just scary to think that you never know who you are really talking to, taking advice from or if any facts are real, and Lonelygirl made that even more clear...lonelygirl would not exist either if someone didn't make her up.
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I hadn't heard about this until now, but I agree, it is VERY sick and twisted! It makes me sad to think it exists, because this happens, it's real life.
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In the process, the series is helping to invent the rhythm, grammar, and style of online storytelling
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If they admitted from the beginning that they were just trying to make an non-fictional online story, then that would be one thing. But they lied so it makes it werid.
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This is not really a new concept, just an old concept displayed in a new technology. Not that the stories were the same but there have been radio programs and movies that originally ran as real but were fake.
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In short, they were planning to exploit the anonymity of the Internet to pull off a new kind of storytelling, and they worried they were on shaky legal ground.
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If they had any bad feeling about it at all, that should of told them right there not to do it.
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It may not be illegal, but it is unethical. Unlike a real movie or TV show, these men where purposefully exploiting viewers online. There would have been no reason for the viewers to think the videos were fake (unlike when we go to a movie and know the characters are played by paid actors). Since there is no universally accepted ethical guidelines for online postings to sites like YouTube, I guess the creators thought their actions could be justified. However, I still think that creating a massive plan to deceive countless viewers like they did is not a good way to represent YouTube and similar spaces.
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Plastic surgery might be an essential part of the entertainment industry, but he wanted more. He wanted to direct.
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Now, as a result of Lonelygirl15, he's represented by a top-tier Hollywood talent agency and has been interviewed on MTV, CNN, and NBC Nightly News. He even has business partners: a former doctor named Miles Beckett and husband-and-wife lawyers Greg and Amanda Goodfried. Together, with next to no budget, they have created a show that illuminates the future of television.
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So today, two weeks after the revelation that the show is fictional, Flinders is filming the 45th two-minute installment of the series and pushing into new territory. What began as a quirky story about a religious girl fighting with her strict parents and her boyfriend is poised to break out of the bedroom and into a full-blown international thriller.
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Last week, he spotted his neighbors – two Playboy playmates – and invited them in. They glanced at his room, got suspicious, and quickly left.
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It's all the more engrossing because viewers can correspond with the characters and even affect the plot.
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Why wouldn't anyone like a show in which they can relate to? This is why I read certain books, because I can relate to the characters in some way. Reality TV has really became a hit in the US. I actually do enjoy some of these new shows.
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Most of the reality shows are extreme case setups. I wonder if that encourages people to react extreme in life. They put you on an emotional overcharge to keep you viewing. Reality is a very lose term for them and even with LonleyGirl they admitted they didn't get the big hits until they made it "emotional".
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Welcome to the set of Lonelygirl15, the breakout Web hit that, in September, was unmasked by fans as a work of fiction. What nearly a million people thought was the room of a sweet, charismatic teen named Bree is actually the Beverly Hills bedroom of Lonelygirl15's cocreator Mesh Flinders, an unshaven 27-year-old who is fighting the flu and running a fever of 101. He hasn't left this room for more than 24 hours. "I've got no reason to leave," Flinders says, rubbing his bloodshot eyes and then blowing his nose. The room smells like sweat. "I write the scripts here, we shoot them here, and I sleep here. Why leave?"
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He clearly has something wrong with him. This is not only unhealthy but a bit scary!
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This guy is a mess...a smart mess though. Does he make a lot of money off this? It has always blown my mind that you can come up wiht such a simple idea and get all the media coverage for it. I'm still waiting for my big break.
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But this isn't what it appears to be: Almost everything in the room was bought from Target on the same day, and the price tags are still hanging from some of her stuff. The closet is filled with men's clothing, and in the corner two guys huddle around a laptop and stare at the webcam feed.
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This paragrapgh really got me thinking about the videos we watched on Lonely Girl. I didn't even seem to pick up on what was hanging in the closet or that things still had price tags on them. Can you see those details from the videos?
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It makes you think about the discussion we had in class the other day about people portraying themselves as whoever they want to be portrayed as. It is amazing that you could think something that seems so real, like an ordinary girl with boy problems, can actually be completely fake!
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It just proves that things aren't always what they seem to be. This is a huge problem with the freedom that the internet provides to those not mature enough to use it responsibly.
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I never knew that it was a fake scene! It reminds me of the discussion we had in class the other day about how people can fake their identies. Most the people in the class just kept using the words, "It's weird" and "Creepy", and that is the only way I know how to describe the crazy phenomon about how people can change who they are and portray themselves as completely different people on the Internet.
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I spoke to soon in my previous sticky note. I didn't fully believe her when she said that she only had one friend. Does it say gullable on the wall? I think it does..
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This doesn't actually bother me. I am a huge fan of reality TV, which we all know is HEAVILY staged and scripted. Who cares that this is too. It's entertainment. Remember how we are always taught not to believe everything we read? That we are to approach everything we read with a critical eye? The same goes for these videos. If we question what we see, the validity of it and the impact we as the viewer choose to assign it to our lives, it shouldn't matter if the video is real or fake.
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When the show started in June with a two-minute YouTube posting by Bree – played by actress Jessica Rose – Flinders would rearrange his room after each shoot.
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When the show started in June with a two-minute YouTube posting by Bree – played by actress Jessica Rose – Flinders would rearrange his room after each shoot. >
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So today, two weeks after the revelation that the show is fictional, Flinders is filming the 45th two-minute installment of the series and pushing into new territory. What began as a quirky story about a religious girl fighting with her strict parents and her boyfriend is poised to break out of the bedroom and into a full-blown international thriller.
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It just boggles my mind how one video turned into 45. I wonder what made him do this, did he want the attention? Where did the story line come from?
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I heard of LonelyGirl before and saw some of her videos and it intrigued me because it was kind of Degrassi-esque, but I really wondered if it was true or not because it shows her being kidnapped and I was wondering why there wasn't an outcry because she was kidnapped, but I had a suspicion that this was all fake, just like all the other shows out there. One thing I have learned over the years is dont believe everything you say/hear.
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He'd take down the pictures of Rose as a baby, stash the stuffed animals, and swap out the girly bedspread for his more masculine blue-and-white-striped blanket. Now, three months into the project and with hundreds of thousands of regular viewers, he doesn't bother
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He wrote short stories about her, and when he tried to make it as a writer in Hollywood, he put her in his screenplays.
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As a camp counselor, he told fireside tales about her experiences.
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Welcome to the set of Lonelygirl15, the breakout Web hit that, in September, was unmasked by fans as a work of fiction. What nearly a million people thought was the room of a sweet, charismatic teen named Bree is actually the Beverly Hills bedroom of Lonelygirl15's cocreator Mesh Flinders, an unshaven 27-year-old who is fighting the flu and running a fever of 101.
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I have never heard of Lonelygirl before, but it is interesting to think about. Today's Internet capabilities allow people to portray themselves in a quite deceiving mannner. This is what's part of the dangers of the Internet. We believe that just because someone has a video or picture, what they post is automatically true. However, this can be quite far from the truth.
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It really makes me wonder what type of research if any he conducted to make it believeable to an audience that a 27 year old male knew the thoughts of a young teen girl? Its very weird and a little disconcerting.
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He got picked on for being small, and there was no escape: The children attended classes taught by the adults of the commune, which was isolated in the windswept hills of western Sonoma County. When he turned 14, Flinders was sent to a Catholic high school, where he was regarded as a hippy devil worshipper, beaten up, and thrown into a dumpster.
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This is an example how the Internet allows people to create false identities and new "selves". In this case, an unpopular, awkward young man grows to be a "needed" and "wanted" person on the web. This show has given him tremendous opportunites, far from what he experienced growing up.
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This also relates to Sherry Turkle's article about creating characters on the internet. It becomes a fantasy world and a new way to explore life for some people
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It seems like these types of people always come up with smart or creative ideas that somehow bring attention to themselves.
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He thought that a dramatic story from the point of view of a video blogger would be more captivating. Flinders, it turned out, had the perfect character.
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I really don't think she was the "perfect character" by any means. The inticing aspect is that some can relate to her but her character is very plain and is seen all over the televsion. The reason this is such a hit is the new medium of tv online not because of the character herself.
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i agree, i don't find her amusing, i find her annoying. i don't get what all the fuss is about?!
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Beckett ordered a pitcher of margaritas and explained that they wanted the vloggers of the YouTube community to believe that Bree was real.
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I agree. I was watching and wondering if people really thought this girl was for real. I mean I know it's fake now, but I feel like I would have thought that had it not become public. I still haven't figured out how people can become obsessed with these bloggers or vloggers. Get up and do something!
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When he got to college, Flinders dreamed up an alter ego – an awkward, geeky homeschooled girl.
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commune
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Plus, to fully harness the medium, they intended to carry on email correspondences with YouTubers while posing as Bree.
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Flinders rationalized the deception, noting that viewers wouldn't expect Mark Hamill to point out at the beginning of Star Wars that he wasn't Luke Skywalker.
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I believe this is a good point but just put way out of context. The author didn't have to explain hidden ideas, because film is seen as an art form. People are used to having a suspension of disbelief when watching a film. Video blogging isn't an art form and people don't know the difference between real or not real yet. Others on the internet truly use blogging as a personal outlet. People may now find all blogs to be misleading, the writing space may lose its verisimilitude due to this controversy.
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This is an interesting point about society and art. We place a lot of value on nonfiction now, much more than we used to. People are getting caught writing "fake" memiors and getting in a lot of trouble for it. We might not expect actors who play the parts to be the real characters, but we often do expect characters to be real.
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Flinders shrugs it off; the room is an upgrade. Six months ago, he was living with his 96-year-old grandmother in rural Central California. Now, as a result of Lonelygirl15, he's represented by a top-tier Hollywood talent agency and has been interviewed on MTV, CNN, and NBC Nightly News. He even has business partners: a former doctor named Miles Beckett and husband-and-wife lawyers Greg and Amanda Goodfried. Together, with next to no budget, they have created a show that illuminates the future of television.
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"It's the producers from Law and Order," she says. "Do you want me to answer it?" "Let it ring," Flinders tells her.
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Beckett says. After four years of medical school and a year of residency, the 27-year-old dropped out of the
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Lonelygirl15 is a mashup of homemade video diary, soap opera, and mysterious, hint-laden narrative like Lost
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Many of the "reality" shows we watch today are scripted and not real at all. This makes the lonelygirl situation more understandable, but no less creepy just because it seems as if one guy decided upon this himself. I wonder how much input the actress had, since she is a girl and all.
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I can understand the appeal of the Loneygirl15 "show" in relation to it being Internet TV. But I still think it is a little creepy that we are willing to accept this guy's lie and justify it as TV itself, even going as far as to identify the genres it fits into.
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I believe that the producers should have come forward and said that the blogs were a ficticious story. I don't feel it is right to use people as guinea pigs when they have no recollection of it. Stories like this make me personally not trust the internet.
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it's a thrillingly uncharted creative landscape, and he has no interest in abandoning it for the tired conventions of film or television
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Flinders himself is startlingly uninterested in traditional TV. He grew up without it and rarely watches it now.
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I find it very interesting that he grew up without television and has sort of moved on to television on the internet. It depicts how technology has changed over time, and sort of hints that television on the internet could ultimately take over. In a way, it already has for Flinders.
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The producer had never been exposed to much televisiona nd its amazing that that is all he is consumed in today. He doesn't like traditional television, but i feel there is something more honest about television. As viewers we have a suspension of disblief when we watch fictional stories on TV. The people watching lonelygirl blogs didn't know what to believe.
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A lot of people don't have time to sit down and watch an hour show on television. With the expansion of computers and internet videos people can watch 15 two minute videos just on their lunch break.
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Plus, to fully harness the medium, they intended to carry on email correspondences with YouTubers while posing as Bree. In short, they were planning to exploit the anonymity of the Internet to pull off a new kind of storytelling, and they worried they were on shaky legal ground.
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It didnt even cross my mind at first that this may not be legal. If the men were so worried that it would be illegal, maybe it should be. I mean they were trying to pretend to be a 15 yr old girl and talk to people. Not only are Hollywood movies known to be fictional, none of the characters hold conversations or email its viewers. I think that underneath the video it should have stated this is not a true person, everything you have seen is fictional, or something of that nature.
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It is alittle upsetting that these producers where making money and fame off of something so misleading. Many people invested they time and feelings into lonelygirl and never knew that she was fake. They would give advice and truly felt for her. I don't know if it's right to make money off of a lie.
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But nobody bought his scripts: Agents and producers didn't think much of the character he had created.
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The room behind her could be anywhere in America – there's a pink floral-print bedspread, a half-dozen stuffed animals, and a framed picture of a rose on the wall.
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It's too much work, even though it has blown some great opportunities for him.
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After working a few years as an assistant to an independent director