It is common knowledge that we as a whole take technology for granted. At this very minute you are reading my words projected onto your screen through an immensely complicated mathematical processes involving 1s and 0s that have been transmitted from some undisclosed location to your machine after being sent to the undisclosed location by myself from a similar machine via a mix of telephone wires and other cables. I’m hazy on the specifics and am fairly certain that the internet runs on magic.
We take the internet for granted and we take many of the things we have come to rely on for granted too. I still remember a time when mobile phones were small if you could squeeze one inside a briefcase and when “wireless” meant “not plugged in which is why it’s not working” (I’m not quite old enough to associate wireless with a radio). Now we not only take mind blowing technology for granted, if it stops working for a second we become Bruce Banner on a bad day.
The one that always trips me up that I take for granted is online video on demand and broadcast technology. In other words, sites like YouTube, Blip TV, Justin TV, Vimeo and several others sat across the internet are an absolute wonder when you stop and think about it.
If you had come up to me when I was 11 and told me that within about ten years, anyone could make their own TV show and put it somewhere where the world can see it, I would have laughed. After all, not even the BBC has that sort of potential audience.
Truth be told, I am very grateful that YouTube wasn’t around when I was 11 because the results would have probably still been kicking around now and as unfortunate early online video pioneers discovered, the internet never forgets. I remember being introduced to the Star Wars Kid video (I’m not going to link to it because I think it’s cruel) as a cautionary tale when a group of us were contemplating making a short Star Wars fan-film.
Regardless, if you had told 11-year-old David Hing that he could have his own TV show, he would have jumped up and down and started plotting away. Now, when you tell 26-year-old David Hing that he could have his own TV show he says something like “yeah, I know, anyone can”.
This apathy is probably a good thing to a certain extent, even if it doesn’t make a tremendous amount of sense to me, as it ultimately self polices the amount of content available. If everyone suddenly started uploading their own shows, then I suppose the internet would get squashed under the weight and no one would watch anything anyway because they’d be making their own shows, not to mention the signal to noise ratio relating to quality issues. Everyone shouting and nobody listening would indeed be a personal hell of mine.
Not everyone is going to be charismatic enough to perform in front of a camera, not everyone is going to be creative enough to think of something interesting to do, and a lot of what is produced anyway is of a fairly poor standard. This is ignoring the fact that not everyone is at all interested in the process as well, but I still think that most people have some base interest or at least a faint fantasy lurking in the back of their head.
What is interesting is that over the last few years there has been a rise of independent television through what are often called webisodes where individuals or groups of people have managed to pull together ideas for shows that would never in a million years be commissioned for traditional broadcast but have found their own following anyway.
Sometimes it’s an issue of finding an audience you wouldn’t find anywhere else. Take The Guild as an example, a show about a group of World of Warcraft players. That might not sound fun, but maybe you should go and watch it. The production values are high, they have professional actors and actresses on board, the script writing is tight and I would imagine that the only reason it is on the internet as opposed to television is because it is about Warcraft players which to anyone running a television network would not sound like a worthwhile investment of time and money when matched against potential ratings figures.
Also, some things just don’t sound like they should work. Something like the Angry Video Game Nerd, a show involving tearing an old video game from the 8-bit or 16-bit consoles to shreds with excessive foul language, would never be commissioned for television yet it has found a dedicated following online and is occasionally hilarious and always highly watchable. In the same sort of vein, the Nostalgia Critic, a show that takes an old show remembered by children of the 80s and dissects it for half an hour, is far more enjoyable than it should be.
You also get formats that would not fit in a regular broadcast schedule. Take The Escapist’s plethora of short video series, including long running shows like Zero Punctuation, Escape to the Movies and Loading Ready Run that sit around the 5-10 minute mark in length. That sort of length fits perfectly on the internet and leads to a neat and tight production, but would be unlikely to find a home with traditional broadcast. On the other end of the scale, you have Red Letter Media’s hour plus videos that crucify the Star Wars prequels in spectacular analysis, slick editing and pitch black humour that would probably struggle to reach broadcast for more reasons than just length.
The rise of internet broadcasting is giving a voice and a platform to millions of potential film makers, show runners or producers. Never before has it been so easy to get together a demo reel than today where we have the technology at our finger tips that would make broadcasters at the birth of the technology weep. I suppose I am writing this as an extended apology to my younger self, but honestly we are unbelievably lucky to live in an age where it is this easy to be heard.
It is true that it helps if you have something worth saying and there’s no guarantee anyone will listen to you, but just think how many people out there have wonderful and exciting ideas that we would never hear about if it weren’t for the internet. One of the first internet viral videos after all was something that eventually turned into South Park, a phenomenal success regardless of what you think of it.
What if you put that project together that you’ve been thinking about for ages and put it out there for the world to see? The worst case scenario is that it would be ignored, but what if it wasn’t?