We Were Framed!

This is fun!

It's amazing what can be done with inexpensive consumer level equipment these days. I like the aesthetic too. The wobbly camera, the jumpy edits, the music that catches the mood, the awareness of the camera by these guys who are hamming it up and having a good time. A nice cross between the home movie and good old fashioned art video. Everything I love about low budget User Generated Content. Or so I thought.

I came across it last week on Michael O'Connor Clarke's blog. But he was pointing out that it's not real - it's an ad.

This is disturbing to me because, like so many millions, I have come to expect User Generated Content to be authentic in some way. What do we do when we come across stuff that has been carefully constructed to look like authentic UGC but is in fact an ad for some corporate entity or other?

Do you share my vague sense of violation, perhaps even despite having actually enjoying watching the clip? This discomfort, and our fascination with our discomfort, has certainly triggered lots of discussion.

My own strange twist of emotions prompted me to show up to a panel discussion event at the Mesh 2007 conference yesterday, featuring Michael OCC, David Jones and Rachel Clarke and hosted by Stuart MacDonald.

The panelists made some very good points that, to my mind, seemed to boil down to "Yes, fake user generated content does feel morally wrong somehow but why the heck is it different than 'traditional' marketing techniques that are both acceptable and effective?"

It got me thinking.

Coming from an art background I'm used to seeing and producing 'fake' content. For example, 'realistic' paintings are illusions - the illusion of 3d space within a flat surface is much of what we enjoy about these kinds of artworks.

In traditional advertising we are also told endless white lies - when a bloke buys this car he will be visited by bikini clad angels, and when a housewife scrubs with that bathroom cleaner she will be overcome with near orgasmic glee.

But none of this disturbs us because we see the illusion. And we accept it.

So why do commercial attempts to sell us stuff through uploading brilliant, but fake, content really rub many of us the wrong way?

I think it's because we can't see the illusion. We see the 'reality', buy into it and then we are told by someone else it's an illusion. And it hurts.

But why can't we seen the illusion?

Again, in thinking about this from an artist's point of view, a clue suggests itself. A painted artwork is framed. In the gallery it typically has a shiny gold frame around it that tells us it's 'art'. This completely alters how we look at it. The gallery itself is a frame and it too completely alters how we look at anything within it. You can put a potato on a pedestal in an art gallery and we will look at it differently.

There are other frames. In newspapers we know how to tell an ad when we see one because it is so different from the columns of text - and it often has a black line around it to separate the 'marketing illusion' from the 'journalistic truth'. If the ad employs the use of pseudo-journalistic writing the newspaper is obliged to add the word 'advertisement' at the top to create a safe frame of reference for us.

And on television we know what is an ad because it is separated in time from the program we are trying to watch. We know this so well we channel hop and skip commercials whenever possible. We rarely try to reconcile the soap opera with the soap.

But where is the frame around user generated content? Much of the appeal of UGC, video, text or jpegs, is its open authenticity. We trust it more than the expensively produced, carefully devised (read manipulative) ads that tell us things we know are not strictly true. It is largely this frame of trust around authentic UGC that defines the content - i.e. it alters how we look at it and allows us to identify more strongly with the producers of the piece. YouTube is a frame. The blogosphere is a frame. They are frames of reference that we hope can be trusted as sources of authenticity.

So when something violates the (mostly unstated) rules that we have formed around UGC it confuses the issue and troubles us. I think we have a right to be upset.

But I don't think such things will offend everyone. No doubt some people will actually enjoy playing on the razor edge of credibility. It will be interesting to see how the Blogos community as a whole will resolve this. What frame could it possibly invent to get its collective head around these real fakes? Or will authenticity just go out the window leaving us to frame the entire phenomenon of User Generated Content with an iron clad cynicism?

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Update: OK, so looking at the YouTube site again I see that one instance of the video has a non-English title with the words "Ray Ban" in it. A remarkably simple framing device that alters how we look at the video. But now two more questions come to mind.

• Will this become a standard practice for "commercial UGC"?
• And if "commercial UGC" is clearly framed, is there any point to making it look like UGC? (i.e. although the technique of the parody may be commendable, the credibility of the aesthetic is still suspect.)