In her article on web serials, Virginia Heffernan discusses the rising trend of web-based shorts that seem to keep appearing. She discusses these low-budget, often humorous series, some of which have cult-like followings reminiscent of the gamers love for The Guild in the series discussed last week.
Most interesting to me in this article was Heffernan's idea of what exactly causes these low-budget serials to attract such a following. Many of these popular web serials seem effortlessly made -- all one needs is a web-cab, something to say, and a few hits on a site. Heffernan's explanation made a lot of sense to me, and really resinated with why I think I was so hooked after watching a few of the episodes of The Guild in class. There is a constant level of not knowing if another one is going to be made -- there is little reliability in the web-based world and such anonymity that a fan of a web serial can never really know if another episode will be made. If a site goes down, there is little a fan can really do. If a site goes down, there is a little a fan can really do -- there is no powerful television network to contact, sometimes the creators are not known by anything more than a screen name or email address. What keeps you hooked is not necessarily the content, but thew ay the content is delivered -- in short spurts that keep you wanting more.
"Engine Room" is a web-based reality competition created by MTV and Hewlett-Packard. The series follows four teams of four people (each representing their prospective parts of the world) for seven weeks as they create various works of digital art using Hewlett-Packard products. Each episode, according the the New York Times article, will last about seven minutes.
There's a ton of stuff that interests me about this series. Going back to the second introduction in the text, the whole idea of new media art really fascinates me. I'm really interested to see what these teams are creating. But in relation to Heffernan's idea of the "keep you wanting more" approach to these web-serials, "Engine Room" fits nicely into her train of thought. MTV has been producing tons of reality based competitions stemming directly from the first real reality show -- The Real World. As ratings drop for shows like The Challenge, a guilty pleasure I personally once engaged in, MTV is trying a new outlet, an outlet that caters towards a generation of instant gratification. Instead of having to wait an hour, through tedious amounts of commercials, all of the product placement-inspired competition is condensed into seven minutes -- only a few hundreds of seconds.
The first episode was constructed in the same style as many of MTV's other reality/competition shows -- there is already a possible love interest, a party girl, etc. Each contestant seems to have his or her own character -- each team their own drive. The attributes that draw the public to reality television -- the idea that you get to watch people like yourself on television -- apply to Engine Room. But while I look forward to seeing how they do on their HP commercial (the first challenge of the series), I find myself finding the whole thing a little less legitimate than I would a longer series. Maybe because it is on the web, maybe because it is so short, maybe because my Internet has been spotty so I had to restart the webisode a few times, maybe because the host's voice cuts out half a second too early -- I worry that I may not feel as invested in these "characters" had the series been televised.
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