Web 2.0 and the Expansion of the Filmic Event

In my talk at the recent MLA conference, I made the following case:

I believe that both the virtual community’s relationship to film and the advancing development of entertainment technology, in and out of the virtual world, suggest that the filmic experience is telescopically, if not exponentially, expanding to an inevitable point: an organic and integrated experience that straddles and blurs the boundaries between the real world and the virtual, between forms and genres of visual entertainment, and between the spatio-temporally isolated experience of the cinema and television and the ongoing experience of everyday life.

and that this "inevitable point" means that:

From here on out, and for those who have the technology and access, the filmic experience will become something less identifiable as traditional film and more recognizable as a hybrid between traditional film and something like a television show (if, in no other way, only by virtue of length and accompanied advertisements). The viewer will be able to choose what she wants to watch and when and where she wants to watch it. Moreover, the experience itself may well be accompanied by a social, “Web 2.0” component wherein the viewer may evaluate a film, asynchronously communicate with the filmmaker, synchronously interact with a virtual community of fellow viewers, or take part in an ARG or fantasy community collaboratively constructed around a particular film or around a series of films.

I used The YouTube Screening Room - a venue gushed about in December - as my paradigmatic example of this - but there are so many more examples of both digital venues and real-world technologies (like AppleTV and the TiVo).

What surprised me so much in the audience's reaction was the vast difference between those who felt like I was pointing out the obvious and those who couldn't accept that the cinematic experience can really happen to someone watching it on a computer screen (or iPhone or other such device) as opposed to the old movie house, big screen.

It seems to me that "Web 2.0" - particularly Web 2.0 as social space - has become a dividing line between those who can accept that social activity can happen without a physical bodily referent (these are the folks who have no problem with considering their facebook friends to be closer than their classmates, co-workers, etc.) and those who can't. Unfortunately, this line too easily looks like one determined by age - typically, the folks who haven't grown up with with the internet fall on one side; and those in the "Wired Generation" fall on the other.

Age aside, perhaps the key to my perspective - one that I'm still figuring out - is that I suggest that the cinematic experience will become (or already is) a hybrid one (and hybrid in a unique way for each individual): consider alternate reality games (ARG) that have surrounded films and television (from the marketing campaign called "The Beast" for the Kubrick cum Spielberg film A.I. to the more recent "Lost Experience"), the popularity of video games based on films (like ones that let you explore the Star Wars galaxy or roam Tolkein's MiddleEarth), or even just the popularity of rating film clips on YouTube... For those of us who want the filmic experience to go beyond the cinema screen, there is ample opportunity.

On the other side of this coin, so to speak, we might expect a cultural reaction comparable to the one regarding the digital distribution of music. Vinyl sales have been skyrocketing in the last few years, suggesting that the digitization of music has left us hungering for a physical artifact. What, then, might a similar reaction to digital film distribution be?