LonelyGirl15 & her claim to Fame

I have been reading so much about this LonelyGirl15's videos on youtube and her popularity that I decided to go have a peek at it. This to determine, what is making the world go gaga-googoo over this video series followed by much ado regarding the fakeness of it. There got to be something...or else why would so many people wait desperately for a next video in that...ain't it?

The intros before we get into the details. Well, on May 2006, there started a vid blog on youtube.com. Doesnot sound exciting enough...Nothing ground breaking..Isn't it? The vid was uploaded by a girl called Bree with userid lonelygirl15. Supposedly she is a 15 year old girl who is having tough time, dealing with her parents and her boyfriend Daniel with userid danielbeast. The girl shot the video with a webcam setup by her geeky boyfriend is what she claims. Now one video followed another...and soon people were waiting for the next vid post of lonelygirl15. Also, there were so many mysterious things portrayed in those vids that all kind of analysis started about what the real life of the girl would be like....what are the ceremonies the girl talks of....and so a whole bunch of people got tuned in to this.

Not to ignore the way the videos were taken. There obviously is a professionalism to those videos. It certainly does not seem like an amateur teenager's video. And there were people who believed it was fake and was setup and others who believed that all this was true!!!! Check out one of the videos yourself.....:) The vidblog got so popular that people started going into the roots of it.....A bunch of the fans set up a sting operation to find out who this girl really was....And Lo!!!It turned out to be indeed an organized show with some media persons involved in the show and not her geeky boyfriend!!!!This entire lonelygirl15 episode is fiction!!!!!! And this Bree aka lonelygirl15 is an actress from NewZealand who was aspiring to make it big. And she did make it big.....for now offers are going to flood her anyways..thanks to her popularity as lonelygirl15!!!!

But if we want to analyse what is it that made it so famous...is it the medium....as in this is the first time(I guess so?) that a real life kinda drama/episode uses blogging as the medium? Would it have been the same if it were in TV?In newspaper? In magazine?What I am trying to say is that perhaps, it is not the story that is important here....but the use of the medium itself!!!

With vid blogging picking up, this can be termed as an experiment. An experiment that ended up perhaps proving the point that the "Internet" is not yet fully tapped. There are still many more ways of using internet to have people hooked onto it. Perhaps the ones that are smart enough, realize this and make money and the rest just witness it happening!!!! More from the creators itself about this vidblog(or can we call it a show now?) here.

However, the thing that still baffles me is how could people believe that all of this could be true from the begining!!!! Or maybe the fact that I watched the videos after it's fakeness got proved is making me say that. There seems to be a big controversy of whether it is fake or not from the intial stages till its proved with evidence now. A more organized article about this here.

And now coming to the topic of how people receive this story of this whole episode being fiction. Obviosly nobody likes to be lied to...though they all would lie themselves...:p The commotion seems to be that how can they have a show run as a blog and fool people and later say it was all fiction......need to wait & watch for more updates......