Sound the Alarm
What people think of us these days is at the mercy of what's on the Web
By J.M. Berger, Globe Correspondent | February 18, 2007
Google "Boston" and "Paul Revere," and you'll find about 816,000 Web pages devoted to the Revolutionary War Hero.
Now try "Boston" and "Aqua Teen." With 1.3 million hits as of this writing, Beantown's infamous false alarm has eclipsed its most venerated real alarm -- in the online world, at least.
The city's end-of-January terrorism scare made national headlines when a series of "suspicious packages" found all over town turned out to be promotional devices for "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," part of the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim lineup on cable television.
It also served as a lesson in how online forces, accountable to no one, can take an issue and tumble it in uncontrollable ways.
For Boston, the actual costs totaled about $1 million. But you can't put a number on the damage to Boston's dignity. The "bomb" scare was just another story to the mainstream media, but in the online world, the tale was fodder for a tidal wave of creative reinterpretations.
The event was a perfect storm for the homegrown-video phenomenon -- strong visuals, readily available news footage, a dash of antiterrorism paranoia, and an absurdist punch line.
"Every possible thing you could think of that would work right for a blogger getting this story out was there," said Darren Winkler , a.k.a. "The Driving Blogger." Based in Columbus, Ohio, he delivers monologues into a video camera from behind the wheel of a car, a cigarette dangling from his lips.
By last week, Winkler's video blog on the Aqua Teen scare had been viewed more than 2,000 times on YouTube, the Web's most popular video-sharing service.
It's just one of dozens of clips featuring Boston's day of chaos. The videos range from simple excerpts of news footage to video blogs to elaborate parodies.
A Boston sketch comedy troupe, Zebro, posted a slick, profanity-laced "newscast" that noted the Mooninite signs "contained all the components of an improvised explosive device, except for the explosives." Zebro easily dominates the Aqua Teen commentary field with a whopping 830,000 views and climbing.
"I feel comfortable in saying we were the first comedy piece on the Aqua Teen" event, said Marly Halpern-Graser , a Zebro member who appears in the video. "A couple people beat us to uploading just clips of the news, but I think we were the first people with an actual comedic thing." Zebro's team finished editing the piece at 7 a.m. the day after the story broke and posted it a few hours after that.
Its take on the "crisis" is its most successful video ever, scoring about twice as many hits as its next most popular YouTube short, said Halpern-Graser, a student at Emerson College.
Several Zebro fans responded by posting their own clips; one was a mock terrorist video claiming to originate in Uzbekistan.
His face obscured by a black ski mask, the "terrorist" opens with a cheery "Hello, American devil!" then brandishes a "Hello Kitty! Fun Time device" that he promises will "blow you up good."
One of the slickest -- and funniest -- entries is a parody of the Fox Network's terrorism thriller "24." Clips from this season's jarring weapon-of-mass-destruction storyline were digitally edited to replace suitcase nukes with the Mooninite LED signs that prompted Boston's day of not-quite-terror.
The video, created by the National Lampoon, climaxes with action hero Jack Bauer (played by Kiefer Sutherland) torturing cartoon characters in an unsuccessful effort to avert nuclear catastrophe.
Amateurs proved equally capable of skewering the debacle. One YouTube wag created a montage of news clips set to the tune of "99 Red Balloons," an '80s pop song about a false alarm that sets off a nuclear war.
Another clip, titled "1/31/07: Never Forget," serves up a 9/11-style tribute, complete with Augustana's maudlin pop ballad "Boston" crooned over somber emergency responders and malevolent Mooninites. Nearly 30,000 people have viewed the tribute to date.
"Bonus points for crying eagle," commented one YouTube viewer.
Circus of the Bizarre
"It teeters on the edge of being laughable and tragic at the same time," said Mark Frauenfelder, cofounder of Boing Boing, one of the Web's most venerable and influential blogs.
Frauenfelder said the story works on multiple levels, feeding into the online community's strong concerns about the government's antiterrorism efforts, aside from its obvious entertainment value.
"Something like this 'Aqua Teen Hunger Force' incident not only shows how mismanaged Homeland Security efforts are on the local and national government level," he said, "but also has kind of an absurdist comical element to it too, because there's a silly cartoon."
The user-created Internet, sometimes called Web 2.0, naturally tilts toward tales of the bizarre and expressions of derision. Easy anonymity and a general lack of consequences allow people to indulge their worst sides in blogs, forums, public comments, podcasts and now video.
In other words, the Internet can be just plain mean, said Winkler.
"There's no question about it," he said. "Unfortunately, I think there's more of that than anything else."
But one can forgive a certain amount of malice when it's leavened with humor. Frauenfelder sees it as a net positive, so to speak . "Satire is such a powerful tool for criticism and self-expression," said Frauenfelder. "And this 'Aqua Teen Hunger Force' event is a great example of that."
A Little for Everyone
The videos aren't just antiauthoritarian critiques of Boston's government. Dozens of clips also memorialized the bizarre press conference held by Sean Stevens , 28, and Peter Berdovsky , 27, who are accused of planting the devices.
"If you're going to be a smartass at a press conference, I think you ought to be smart first and be an ass later," observed Winkler in his own video blog entry.
The news media also took a pounding for puffing the Mooninite threat up to epic proportions -- and for failing to see the humor in the situation.
Stevens and Berdovsky "keep talking about hair, which is hilarious," said a video blogger identified only as Frankus . "But what's hilarious is that none of the reporters get it. It's all like they are these drugged, sleepy sheep of a people."
Some YouTube users were indignant and incredulous that no one in Boston's city government was hip enough to recognize the Aqua Teen characters.
"In the media, they're acting like, 'What's Aqua Teen? What's Aqua Teen? I've never heard of this show,' " marveled video blogger KeN . "Dude, Aqua Teen is Aqua Teen."
"Aqua Teen Hunger Force" averages about a million viewers per episode, according to Nielsen Media. Not bad for cable, but those numbers put it in the company of such mainstream broadcast disasters as "The Megan Mullally Show" and give it not even half the viewers of an average "Gilmore Girls" outing.
The median age of an Aqua Teen viewer is 19.7, according to Nielsen. Many of the show's fans are avid users of YouTube, where clips from it are readily available.
The concentration of Aqua Teen fans on the Internet is far higher than in the general population , said Halpern-Graser, who dismisses the outrage over Boston government's snub of the cartoon's cultural merit.
"They should have recognized that they weren't bombs, but you can't fault the mayor for not recognizing an obscure cartoon character," he said.
National Laughingstock?
Regardless of how the blame game shakes out, the fact remains that Boston's image has taken a beating.
Whether one's sympathies lie with beleaguered city officials or bedraggled guerrilla marketers, it seems no one can spare a kind word these days. In the online world, at least, many of Boston's claims to fame have been eclipsed by its shame.
Are we really seen as a city of fatally unhip, drastically overreacting, possibly fearmongering, seriously humor-lacking dolts?
"I think that Boston took a hit on this," said Winkler. Although he feels the city overreacted, he said, "I think most people understand why it happened that way."
"It shows, obviously, that everyone is paranoid," said Halpern-Graser, who thinks both local officials and media outlets may have secretly craved a real crisis.
"They wanted to use all the security measures they had in place," he said. "It just seemed like they should have been able to call it off sooner than they did."
The view from outside the Bay State is somewhat more charitable.
"I don't think it actually does reflect on the people of Boston in a negative way," said Frauenfelder, who is based in LA. "It was a random series of events that escalated and shot off on this crazy trajectory. It could have happened anywhere."
As for poor old Paul Revere, "it's the nature of the times," said Winkler, who feels that history has been deemphasized in the right-now culture that runs parallel to Web 2.0. "The pace of the world has changed since I was a child," said Winkler, who's in his forties. "If you think about those numbers, they do mean something."
"I think it shows you the power of the Internet to spread a message around current events," said Frauenfelder.
"If Paul Revere would have done his midnight ride last week, he probably would have tens of millions of results."
J.M. Berger can be reached at
jmberger@egoplex.com
? Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.
