The Social Media Fembots Are Among Us?

MTV’s “TRL” recently welcomed Poppy, a rising star with hologram-perfect skin, an avant-garde Japanese schoolgirl wardrobe and a voice like Betty Boop’s on benzos..

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For much of the show, she perched silently on the couch and methodically stacked candies on a glass table. A longhaired handler called Titanic Sinclair accompanied her, explaining, “I’m just making sure she doesn’t malfunction.” Poppy proved a tough interview. Asked what she thought of the Grammys, which had aired the night before, she chirped: “Um, I don’t really remember them.” Then she changed into a costume that made her look like a beautiful egg yolk and performed “Bleach Blonde Baby,” a song about how she was born with full makeup and a mani-pedi.

Poppy is — to sum up her project most simply — an android-themed pop star. She first appeared on YouTube in 2014, in a video where she eats cotton candy while an overdubbed soundtrack plays oddly pleasant eating sounds. When she speaks, Poppy exhibits the limited range of a chat bot, the oddly formal vocabulary of a digital assistant (she says “New York New York” and “YouTube dot com”) and the late-capitalist tics of an online influencer. In “Hey YouTube,” she repeats vlogger greetings — “What’s up, guys?” and “Hey YouTube!” — until they lose their meaning. In “I am empowered,” she purrs, “I feel empowered when I create high-quality content on the internet” over and over again.

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The fembot has long been a pop culture fixation, but now feminized tech is all around us. Digital helpmeets like Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana are fitted with nonthreatening feminine voices and programmed to respond to sexist comments with cutesy repartee. (If you tell Siri to make you a sandwich, she replies: “I can’t. I have no condiments.”) Creepy techno-Pygmalion stories — like the one about the guy who 3-D-printed his own Scarlett Johansson bot on his patio — captivate the online news landscape. With the help of machine learning, a community of Redditors are creating highly realistic fake porn that melds famous actresses’ faces onto porn performers’ bodies. Twitter lit up with crazed sex-robot memes last month after images of a new sex doll styled as an Instagram model (swollen lips, thick thighs and an athleisure-lingerie uniform) went viral.

And, of course, we can conjure the illusion of intimacy with famous women as we scroll through their Instagram profiles and consume their Snapchat feeds, dispensing or withholding likes. Projects like Poppy poke at the cyborg nature of online fame itself, where female bodies are mapped onto the social platforms they inhabit — constantly resized, customized and upgraded to please their followers.

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Poppy’s YouTube videos have been viewed more than 257 million times, and now her persona is permeating the culture: She’s logged a “Today” show appearance, a Times Square billboard, a Comedy Central Snapchat series and a Sanrio sponsorship. She’s now in the midst of an American concert tour and starring in a web series pilot, “I’m Poppy,” on YouTube’s paid subscription tier, YouTube Red.

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The commentary of Poppy is not exactly subtle, but the performance of the woman behind her — the 23-year-old Moriah Pereira — is eerily fascinating. (Titanic Sinclair, her creator-handler-director figure, is played by the 30-year-old Corey Mixter.) Poppy’s voice has the soothing affect of an A.S.M.R. video, those recordings of rustles and whispers capable of evoking tingling sensations on the back of your neck. The way she pauses and freezes between statements — as if she’s downloading a new dialogue program and recalibrating her expression to fit it — is uncanny.

If Poppy is a person who acts like a robot, Lil Miquela is a C.G.I. creation posing as a human being. She’s a computer-animated Instagram model edited into real backgrounds, posed with real people and dressed in real streetwear that you can buy, too. Her look — enormous matte lips, thick eyebrows, a dusting of freckles on her Barbie-smooth skin — is an exaggerated version of the beauty standard that’s swept the platform, making its most-followed women look oddly similar and a little bit unreal. Now she has her own side hustle, too, a series of clubby singles featuring her heavily Auto-Tuned voice. Miquela draws out tensions about the authenticity of social media performance; sometimes she filters her face through stylized anime beauty apps, layering artifice on artifice. She doesn’t say much, but in a rare phone interview posted on YouTube, a woman calling herself Miquela parried a question about her fakeness with a provocation: “Can you name one person on Instagram who does not digitally edit their photos?”

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Fembots are being designed to look more like internet stars, but perhaps internet stars are being designed to look like fembots, too. Take Kylie Jenner, who now ranks among Instagram’s most popular users — she recently topped 100 million followers — and who holds great sway over the platform’s aesthetic, which she molds through example but also via sales of her wildly popular Kylie Cosmetics line. Clicking through an image gallery of Ms. Jenner’s changing looks over time — watching her lips balloon with fillers, her skin tone deepen, her eyes pop open and her facial features chisel — gives the sensation of a model’s upgrading. A fan of wigs, Ms. Jenner changes her hair color so frequently (often into shades of neon or sorbet) that it recalls the ease of a Photoshop click and the appeal of an endlessly customizable object. It’s so typical for Ms. Jenner to appear on Instagram with her phone in the shot that she begins to evoke the image of a cyborg, device permanently attached to her hand.

Then there’s Ms. Jenner’s affect: blank. She posts video clips of repetitive motions that loop over and over again — freshly manicured fingers stroking a piece of fur, a glittery eyelid half-opening — giving her an animatronic vibe. In a 2015 feature for Interview magazine, Chris Wallace, then the senior editor, described Ms. Jenner as “almost sex-doll sanguine.” On the cover, she appeared clad in latex fetish gear, posed in a wooden shipping container or tucked under a man’s arm, staring into the middle distance.

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Though the field of artificial intelligence is bent on creating robots that seem realistic — ones that can pass the Turing test by persuasively mimicking human beings in conversation — the subfield of fembot creation seems more fixated on creating something physically perfect but mentally deficient. In the online magazine Real Life, Janna Avner smartly noted that the fembot creator “turns the limitations of bot technology into a kind of strength.” The failure of artificial intelligence to actually match human intelligence is a feature, not a bug. The sex robot memes on Twitter play off the moment when the doll becomes sentient, when she begins criticizing her owner or asking about their relationship status, at which point he lunges for the reset button or unplugs her.

The idealized digital women of film and television — “Her,” “Ex Machina,” and “Westworld” — become nightmares when they acquire minds of their own. But our cyborg internet stars are suspended on the web without a redemption narrative. Followers of Poppy, Lil Miquela and Kylie Jenner can be consumed by the mysteries of their origin stories. Who is the architect of Poppy’s satirical project? Is Lil Miquela based on a mysterious real woman’s photographs, or was she materialized out of nothing? Which plastic surgery procedures has Ms. Jenner had? What filters does she use?

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In the pilot for “I’m Poppy,” a Hollywood figure asks: “Where did she come from? Who is she with?” The answers elude him, but when he hears she has 50 million followers, he decides: “She’s perfect.” The follower count justifies the star’s existence, and their interactions animate and regenerate the star’s persona.

On her reality series, E!’s “Life of Kylie,” Ms. Jenner has said that her followers drive her pressure to post more and better selfies to Instagram and that she’ll delete images that don’t instantly please, turning her own image into a site of crowd curation. It’s as if her fans themselves are molding her to their specifications.

Guest Authored By Amanda Hess. Amanda is a David Carr Fellow at The New York Times. She writes about internet culture for the Arts section and contributes regularly for the New York Times Magazine. Before she joined The Times in 2016, she wrote for such publications as Slate, the Washington City Paper, ESPN the Magazine, Elle, and Pacific Standard, where her feature on the online harassment of women won a National Magazine Award for Public Interest. She was raised in Wisconsin, Nevada, Washington and Arizona. Follow Amanda on Twitter.

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• 

  Authored by:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBr@nd.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, CO  where I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

YOUR Social Media Silent Film?

The summer’s hottest destination for video entertainment is a U.K.-based social media brand called LADbible. In July alone, the viral clips that churn out of its Facebook page were viewed more than 3 billion times..

Though the site is nominally branded around young British men, its offerings hold an oddly universal appeal. On a recent afternoon, it served up videos of a guy accidentally hitting himself in the head with a baseball bat; a pizza being made out of French fries; a dog bathing in a Jacuzzi; a woodworker crafting a salad bowl; a tourist riding a slide down the Great Wall of China and a manatee kissing a snorkeler.

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The videos are curated from disparate sources, filmed on smartphones and GoPros around the world, but they all have one thing in common: They’re best watched silently. If they even have sound, it’s completely beside the point.

We are living in the golden age of the silent video. Though we may still pop headphones in to watch a YouTube rant, social media has cultivated its own mute visual culture. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are designed to encourage endless scrolling, and that boosts videos that are made to catch the viewer’s eye without offending her ear with grating bursts of noise.

The clips that spread the furthest online are the ones that can be consumed anywhere without disruption: on the subway, the sidewalk or in the doctor’s office; next to a partner in bed, behind the counter at work or under the desk in class. They’re the ones that allow for private experiences in the most public of places. And in the internet’s global marketplace, they’re the ones that transcend language barriers, instantly legible to viewers in Peoria or Paris.

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Tubular Labs, the online video analytics company that placed LADbible at the top of its rankings, has found that of videos posted to Facebook by media companies, 46 percent of views go to videos that are completely silent or just accompanied by music. And in practice, an even higher proportion of social videos are watched silently. The advertising agency BBDO Worldwide says that more than 85 percent of its clients’ Facebook videos are viewed with the sound off.

All of that has given rise to a particular kind of video spectacle on social media, one that is able to convey its charms without dialogue, narrative or much additional context. To entertain soundlessly, viral video makers are reanimating some of the same techniques that ruled silent film over 100 years ago.

“For coincidental reasons as much as knowing reasons, we’ve seen a rebirth of a very image-forward mode of communication,” said James Leo Cahill, a professor of cinema studies at the University of Toronto. Among its hallmarks: a focus on spectacle, shocking images and tricks; the capture of unexpected moments in instantly recognizable scenarios; an interplay between text and image; and a spotlight on baby and animal stars.

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The very first short-form cinematic experiments — silent clips that arose even before film evolved into a feature-length narrative form in the early 20th century — have become known as what film scholar Tom Gunning calls the “cinema of attraction,” films that worked by achieving a kind of sensual or physiological effect instead of telling a story.

Created by early filmmakers like the French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière and the American inventor Thomas Edison, these early movies took cues from the circus and the vaudeville circuit, featuring performers from that world, and were then played at vaudeville shows. Taken together, they formed what Gunning has called an “illogical succession of performances.”

Social media has created a new kind of variety show, where short, unrelated videos cascade down our feeds one after another. If early films were short by necessity — the earliest reels allowed for just seconds of film — modern videos are pared down to suit our attention spans and data plans. Some viewing habits of social video also recall Edison’s Kinetoscope, one of the earliest film-watching contraptions, which invited single viewers to view short clips through a peephole, offering a voyeuristic look at everything from Annie Oakley shooting to some guy sneezing. Mobile video has again returned us to a cinematic form that’s screened for an audience of one.

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Just as early films made stars out of stage magicians and circus performers, we’ve seen a resurgence of popularity of pure visual spectacle on social video, whether it’s in the studied technological tricks of stunt performers like the modern YouTube magician Zach King or the capture of the spontaneous wonders of nature.

Early filmmakers were also drawn to “the capacity to show the unfolding of irreversible acts, something that could only happen once,” Mr. Cahill said — like a boa constrictor digesting a rabbit. Camera tricks were instantly popularized. The films would take a realist image “and make it magnificent, wondrous and fantastic, literally incredible,” Mr. Cahill said.

Shocking images have ruled since the early days of web video, but social media has accelerated the pace at which we consume them, encouraging the clips that provide instant gratification without the need for aural context. We’ve also seen a cinematic resurgence of the mesmerizing spectacle of physical work: A recent viral video of a guy masterfully painting a disabled parking spot recalls a Lumière film showing workers tearing down a wall.

In the absence of dialogue and involved narratives, early films focused on “actualities,” or setups that would appear instantly recognizable to audiences.

Often, on both social media and in early film, textual clues are provided to viewers outside of the filmed image — in film titles presented to early-20th-century audiences, or in Facebook captions that guide modern viewers. A series of Edison actualities with titles like “What Happened When A Hot Picture Was Taken” and “What Happened In the Tunnel” parallel the modern meme format of pairing a short video with a brief emotional cue: “That feeling when…”

Or consider “What happened on 23rd street in New York City,” which shows a pair of actors, a man and a woman, strolling down the sidewalk when a blows up the woman’s skirt, revealing a tantalizing glimpse of petticoat. You can find modern equivalents of that video everywhere on social media, evidence of actors filming themselves making unexpected moves in crowds of real people. (In both eras, it’s often hard to discern who’s acting and who’s just being.) A recent specimen making the rounds on Facebook, “When The Splits Are Life,” shows a woman appearing in various everyday settings — the grocery store, the street corner, the auto repair shop — and spontaneously breaking into feats of flexibility.

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And just as some early films would use brief intertitles to serve as setups and punch lines to visual jokes — the 1900 stunt film, “How It Feels to be Run Over,” shows a vehicle riding over the camera’s position, followed by the intertitle: “oh! Mother will be pleased” — much of the most popular Facebook videos reimagine the intertitle with big text captions that plug videos into meme formats. According to Tubular Labs, 22 percent of video views on media brands’ Facebook pages take the form of short video clips with prominent captions.

One of the most striking parallels of early silent film and modern social video is the foregrounding of animals and babies.

They make natural silent stars because they are largely speechless; they communicate largely through gesture, movement and expression. But they also suit cinematic forms that are focused on realistic spectacles as opposed to masterful narratives. The old truism — don’t work with children or animals — speaks exactly to why they are the ideal stars of both early actualities and of contemporary Facebook videos. They can’t be tamed, so it seems as if what they are doing is somehow natural and true.

It’s striking that with all of the technological advances that have allowed us to shoot and share video instantly, we’ve returned to some of film’s most original instincts. It wasn’t long after the rise of Kinetoscope, actualities and the cinema of attraction that new technologies upended those early forms, giving way to feature-length narratives, talkies and Technicolor.

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It’s unclear where social video innovation will take the form next, but if anything, modern video is moving in the opposite direction of cinema’s rise: We keep cramming more spectacle and information into smaller and faster bits of entertainment, even discarding whole experiential possibilities — like audio tracks — if they seem to slow it down.

As the online media industry continues along its much-discussed “pivot to video,” we’ll see more and more of our online experiences churned into those hypervisual micro forms, as every inch of screen space gets recast as a flashing billboard. We can expect it all to come faster, brighter and flashier in the future — just maybe not louder.

Guest Authored By Amanda Hess. Amanda is a David Carr Fellow at The New York Times. She writes about internet culture for the Arts section and contributes regularly for the New York Times Magazine. Before she joined The Times in 2016, she wrote for such publications as Slate, the Washington City Paper, ESPN the Magazine, Elle, and Pacific Standard, where her feature on the online harassment of women won a National Magazine Award for Public Interest. She was raised in Wisconsin, Nevada, Washington and Arizona. Follow Amanda on Twitter.

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“As the online media industry continues along its much-discussed “pivot to video,” we’ll see more and more of our online experiences churned into those hypervisual micro forms, as every inch of screen space gets recast as a flashing billboard.

We can expect it all to come faster, brighter and flashier in the future — just maybe not louder..

• 

  Authored by:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)