If you’re one of the many who was raised watching way too much television, you might find real life a little dull. In fact, routine daily chores might seem almost pointless without the laugh track that accompanies most daily chores on sitcoms. Laundry jokes, cooking jokes, shopping jokes – if you didn’t know better, you might think an audience is really watching you live your life. Weirder still, you might long for an audience to be watching you live your life.
Our collective obsession with celebrity and all that goes along with it seems to have gotten so hot it has morphed into a supernova, burning itself alive. Our hunger has driven us to skip the usual step of a person making it to stardom. It used to be a Darwinian competition where only the ruthless and beautiful survived.
No longer. Fame is attainable like never before. Ordinary people become celebrities every day. All we have to be willing to do is give up our privacy. Those who want the love and adoration of the public can’t also expect to pick and choose when to turn the cameras on. A deal with the Devil has no escape clause.
The fear of becoming instantly famous has not scared away the many who turn over their personal stories to reality television, the rare blogs on the net, and now another odd modern phenomenon, personal videos. High speed Internet has made uploading and viewing video a snap. Sites like YouTube and Revver are making serious cash off of we narcissistic many.
But all of that is about to graduate to a whole new level with NBC’s interactive daytime show that will start out in select cities, including the Bay Area. The new show is a partnership between One True Media and NBC’s IVillage Live. Yes, even you can be on TV if your personal story is interesting enough.
One True Media allows users to create multimedia presentations (not unlike MySpace) set to music. This project is the first of its kind and will surely set a trend.
The objective here is to fuse television and Internet use into one cohesive whole so you can have your interactivity and watch yourself on TV too.
Luring viewers to the latest and greatest is never easy. No matter how many other friendship sites there are out there, MySpace is still the most popular and useful. Ditto for YouTube. Whether One True Media and IVillage Live can create that kind of excitement remains to be seen. If it does catch on, it will do so organically. And it will come at a time when people are ready to merge their two separate worlds.
Ten years ago this sort of thing was unheard of. Computers were for work; television was for relaxing. Such is not really the case anymore. Most of us are plugged in, hooked up, zoned out and pity the poor fool who tries to make us part with Google or Mapquest or Ebay.
With our webcams and our videophones and our video diaries, we clearly aren’t sick of watching ourselves. NBC is gambling on the idea that we also want everyone else to watch us too.
Although this new media is bound to appeal more to the highest spending demographic in our society, the teens and young adults, it’s hard to imagine any teen embracing a stodgy site like IVillage. On the net, association and perception is everything. Uncool is uncool.
IVillage Live is available simultaneously on air, online and in front of a live studio audience, on NBC-owned and operated stations, Bravo and www.iVillageLive.com.
