Curator's Note
This column is based on a paper I’m giving at the ‘Ephemeral Media’ workshop on online content at the University of Nottingham in June. In many ways the use of the internet as a platform for audio-visual content represents the current pinnacle in technological attempts to make such content permanent. Whilst the broadcast stream moves fleetingly through time, gone the moment it appears, the VCR, PVR and DVD allow viewers to capture a moment of this ephemeral flow, turning it into a piece of video tape or a section on a hard drive. The internet takes this even further with the construction of vast archives of content that offer permanent and constant access to televisual material.
However, the clips on the left, from web series Kate Modern, show how online video content is also working to recapture the ephemeral moment of broadcasting. Hosted by the social networking site Bebo, the series presents a form of entertainment that simultaneously utilises the ‘anti-ephemeral’ archive capacity of the internet whilst promoting a ‘hyper-ephemeral’ mode of engagement. The former is clear in the total length of the series (almost 14 hours over the two seasons) and the permanent access to the series offered through its website (www.bebo.com/katemodern). The latter is evident through techniques such as marathons, where viewers were invited to remain at their computers for 12 hours as new videos were released hourly, and quizzes that formed part of the narrative and viewers had to solve before the next episode. These clips show the most extreme example of this hyper-ephemeralisation where viewers were invited to go to Carnaby Street in London at a specific time, meet a character from the series and watch the following episode unfold in front of them. The drama of Kate Modern became as ephemeral as real life as its makers sought to encapsulate the real-time communicative capabilities of the internet within their video series. Despite being able to watch the series at any time, it is constantly made clear that if you weren’t watching at a particular moment, you have missed the ‘true’ experience of Kate Modern.
Comments
localized experiences and corporate owned accessibility
Really interesting post Liz and a nice way to kick off the theme week. I agree that online content like Kate Modern can simultaneously offer viewers anti-ephemeral access and hyper-ephemeral experiences. I believe that TV has attempted similar manoevers in an era of DVR and DVD commercial skipping options, such as when series like American Idol place time limits on when viewers can vote for their favorite performers.
What I find fascinating about Kate Modern inviting fans to show up at Carnaby Street to be part of the series as it unfolds, was how this strategy defies the global distribution logic of web-based series by promoting the hyper-ephemeral experience as also a very localized one, where only London-based fans could really partake. In this sense, I wonder if there is an important relationship between the experience of temporal ephemerality and spatial specificity engendered through such strategies (a sort of 'do you remember where you were when...' experience, now reconfigured for the participatory logics of convergence)?
One final thought about permanent access: I think we also need to be attuned to who controls these archives. I was recently heartbroken to discover that the Sci-Fi network had removed hundreds of fan-submitted videos for Battlestar Galactica because their promotional value to the network had expired. Much like with physical archives, someone is making decisions over what online content has permanent value and what can be discarded. I now make certain to burn copies of anything online I might later want, just as I do with my DVR and TV.
Archive Vs. Ephemeral; Global Vs. Local
Hey Liz, great post. You hit upon what I think is a really key issue for online/digital media - that is, the tension between the possibility for a vast and permanent archive of digital materials vs. the constant threat of its disappearance and ephemerality. Like Avi, I also hoard countless clips from YouTube etc. in the fear that one day the dreaded "this video is no longer available" will appear in its place. Of course, this is only useful to a certain extent, and in a "Web 2.0" culture such as this, the videos we are discussing are usually accompanied by a range of other significant materials (next to other clips, underneath ad banners, etc.) that would be hard, if not impossible to fully reconstruct.
This brings me to my second point, and something that Avi also mentions - the issue of space. One way to pursue this question might be to consider how the series was/is marketed on Bebo's site. If there is advertising, is it from local (i.e. British) sponsors, or does it use "intelligent advertising" (an oxymoron, I know) that adjusts the advert according the IP address of the visitor? No doubt we will be discussing these ideas more in the coming months and throughout the Ephemeral Media workshop.
Stunting, Archiving, and the Aesthetics of Ephemerality
Liz – your post and videos do an excellent job of inaugurating this week’s discussion, and of introducing some of the themes that we will be exploring at Nottingham this summer. As I’m a little late to the discussion, I wanted to address a few of the other posters’ comments and pose a few questions of my own for Liz.
RE James on “stunting”: In addition to the Carnaby St “event” captured in the second video, there’s another form of stunting taking place here in the crossover between Kate Modern (KM) and lonelygirl15. Liz, are crossovers between the two series common? On television crossover stunts typically involve characters migrating between a single network’s or studio’s programs (e.g. NBC’s mid-1990s Must See TV crossovers). In an online context, does a site like Bebo assume some of the functions and responsibilities previously carried out by the network or studio, using crossovers and other stunts to establish brand identity and/or something akin to a flow across its programming? Or is there something else taking place here, something that owes more to the rhizomatic logics of hypertext than to television’s well-established stunting practices?
As I’m assuming is the case for many people interested in online video, Avi’s and JP’s comments about archiving hit home for me. I wanted to second JP’s observation that what is most in danger of being lost is not the videos themselves but the paratexts that surround them. This is a problem that TV historians are well-acquainted with (I myself am currently struggling to find archived copies of early examples of the “previously on…” recap montages that appear before serial dramas). That said, online video presents a whole new set of challenges for those of us who are as interested in a medium’s “promotional surround” as we are in its texts proper. Web serials like KM or lonelygirl15 appear on multiple web pages at once, where they may be surrounding by a (literally) dynamic assortment of ads, promos, and paratexts. Liz, in your research on KM, how have you accounted for the multiple sites on which the series may accessed, and the different paratexts that surround it in each of these locations?
Finally, one thing that leapt out at me about the second video was the way that the editing seemed to cycle through footage taken by the many recording devices that were present at Carnaby Street that day. This got me to thinking: what kinds of visual tricks and tropes can online video producers use to creating an impression of immediacy within the contexts of series that are almost entirely composed of a phone- or web-cam style videography? What are the aesthetics of the modes of ephemerality and the anti-ephemerality that Liz’s post describes?
Great Post!
Wow... Elizabeth, great post -- I was a writer on Season 2 of KateModern (the preferred spelling of our show(!)) and just wanted to leave a message that I'm hugely enjoying the level of discussion here -- it's breathtaking.
It's the first time I have read a coherent analysis of the implications of the live events. We tried to take them one step further with the live webcasts during the "12 in 12" Precious Blood, and the series finale.
For us, the writing team, it was a huge experiment -- and we were storylining and scripting about a week ahead of shooting which was about a week ahead of uploading. But we had the 'luxury' of being able to drop in quick turnaround and 'live' episodes as we went along.
We followed the 'rules' developed by lonelygirl15 with the different types of episode -- diary/vlog, found footage, live upload, and live event.
The live events operated under the conceit that the fans could film them in the open, and upload their footage themselves, which meant those episodes have more of a 'movie' feel to them -- they are the only episodes we could have the action shot from multiple angles.
There was also a little flurry of fan activity between the live event, and that day's episode being uploaded by the character - with fans passing on information to other fans before the episode is released.
I can heartily recommend the lonelygirl15 fansite
www.lg15today.blogspot.com
which covers more community reaction to stunts and experiments on the shows,
and I bank links to other shows on my own online drama site
www.storygas.com
All the best
Neil
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