A NEW KIND OF TRIBUTE

It seems there's always been a need for people to laugh, cry, gasp, smile, frown or be scared half to death in the faux reality of entertainment. Whether it's a dramatic stick drawing on a cave wall, a Shakespearean play or a Spielberg movie, folks just love a corkscrew loop on the emotional roller coaster of escapist media. Of course, it's not always fake.

When famous people die, many are genuinely sad or even overwhelmed. At the very least, they're extremely interested in information and circumstances related to the passing. That leads to a flood of media attention. We mentioned this in our June 26 post on tribute production.

We feel compelled to follow up on that post by sharing another tribute we found. Here's the link...http://billietweets.com/. This piece is another in the fast rising groundswell of user produced content. It's fresh, unique and clever. It doesn't have the production value or emotional tug of say a long form HBO promo but, it grabs you just the same. It has originality going for it and that's a lot.

How did a microblog time-suck like twitter become a production tool and creative inspiration in and of itself? Hard to say but a simple theory is it's new and when you get a new toy, you play with it ferociously at first until you've squeezed every last bit of fun out of it, or broken it. You experiment with unintended uses to see what is possible. At least these are things that a child or creative adult would do. As far as breaking it, you've all seen the fail whales.

In an age where everything feels like it's been done before, twitter and the like can give things a fresh edge. Underneath, the billietweets piece is just another MJ tribute. It uses video, audio and text, all pre existing tools. It doesn't even add creative content, it only follows the words of the song. Despite all of that, it FEELS new. You haven't quite seen it before.

The deal is, technology changes quickly but the human condition, not so much. Computers haven't stopped us from laughing, crying and all the rest. At one time we gathered in the town square to get info and catch up. Fast forward to the water cooler and then fast forward again to web. Somewhere in there, was a time when we used to stare at the radio, completely awed by what came out of it.

All the buzz now is, how will radio find it's new place by making nice with the internet? How will it avoid being run over by twitter and the other cutely named devourers of attention? We don't have the answers but, as creative people, we can certainly see that the new web toys are demanding to be played with more often. They challenge us all to find unintended uses with unexpected results. That doesn't sound like the end of radio, it just sounds like fun.