Film and Digital Media @ Messiah

The social networking networking site Bebo brings back its web serial KateModern for a second season, but the lead character, nasty Kate Modern, has been bumped off. Bebo’s international president Joanna Shields says the plot twist was decided by viewer feedback and is an example of the influence audience members have in this now-and-wow “interactive” medium.

Recall: it’s these kinds of “filmmakers” that Jean Luc Godard critiqued as “… die Menschen machen Filme im Internet, weil sie das Bedürfnis haben zu existieren, nicht weil sie etwas sehen wollen.”[… the people making movies on the Internet because they have a need to exist, not because they want to envision something.]. Simply look through the episodes of this high-profile web soap opera and note the paucity of cinematically interesting shots. It’s always the same visually: herky-jerky hand-wanky camera moves (which are supposed to be cinema-veritéish) or wide-angle closeups (meant to be confessional — “oooh, a closeup whisper, must be a dark, dirty secret …” — how cliché can you get!).

Beyond the visual banality, what makes KateModern ground-breakingly “interactive” as the Reuters video declares? The fact that the producers listen to viewer input about the show? Sorry, but Captain Video (1949-55) was already highly interactive in this way. The only difference is that the feedback from the audience is done electronically rather than by snail-mail. Otherwise there’s not one thing different in the interactions that the producers of these two shows have with their audiences. However, Captain Video really was ground-breaking, while KateModern is a pile of clichés.