No Man’s Blog

When I first saw this video I must admit I had one of these Andrew-Keen-is-right moments, but diving into the reactions made me realise that this i one of the greatests collaborative art projects I’ve seen for a while (OK, I might have carried away here but it’s still really cool ). It’s another case of a Youtube micro, disposable community that gives you a fascinating ethnographic glimpse into human digital social behaviour and to what makes people tick (hint - cute and peculiar sell)

It all started with one cute bunny posting this video:

For reasons discussed below, the video generated 2,687,293 views , 16,234 comments and 65 video responses to date.

The trick of fishing people in with juicy worms, whether XXX-related or skaters stunts, is well known and overly used but this one is different as the title suggests nothing (so it can’t come up on search unless you’re really into *@11*) which means that the video itself needs kick ass viral power that makes people want to share it with their friends.

Now, when it comes to ’social power’ on or off-line , cute girls have loads as we all know too well. And when they’re not only cute but peculiar and/or mysterious, if it were for youtube they could win the US presidential elections. And of course being surprising and/or provocative (i.e. to stare in silence at the camera) always helps to increase spreadability.

Apart from fans (”You are the best!”) and haters (”god wtf is up with this chick. just fucking sitting there like a dogg tryin to figure out wat a computer is. fuck how do people watch this. fuckkk”) attempts at understanding or breaking the code (”She’s attempting to make the “^v^” face”. The shape of her chin and the direction of her face to the camera kind of helps her, but I’m not really sure that it’s physically possible to pull that one off”.) the comments as you can expect deal with all the stuff we deal in the sphere - what is youtube good for? what makes a video so sticky? as well as genuine frustrations (”God f***ing damn it all to hell. You have people writing material for weeks for their shows to get some viewers on youtube and this person just sits there with her anime eyes.”)

It starts to get painfully funny (or sad depends on your mood…) when you browse the video reactions. Is that the beginning of the starring trend? It surely provoked some starring competitors…Or is it a new aliens-friendly collaborative project? hypnosis-wiki?

Whatever it is, this is creative herd behaviour at it’s best.

Otrivin dude:

This dude took the opportunity to enact some pervy fantasy

Rodan wants to play too:

As well as this muppet (should have turned the sound OFF duh!)

Finally, this guy is telling it like it is…. (PG contains offensive language)

Sorry mate, I know how frustrating it is, but only cute chicks can do nothing but starring at the camera for 37sec and get 2.6 million views, thats life dude.

Magibon or MRirian has a channel with over 40 videos in which mostly she just cutely and creepily stares but sometimes utter some words. And these videos generate millions of views and dozens of video reactions including the inevitable trailer mash-up. Here’s to we media.

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