“Do you know we’re all here, waiting for the next segment? Wandering up and down the web all night, looking for where you’ve left it for us? We are. Well not me personally, lately, but that’s because I seem to have followed Parkaboy’s advice and started trying to find another way to hack in. And I guess I have – we have – because we’ve found those codes embedded in the footage, that map of the island or city or whatever it is…I’ve been able to get to this email address, and now I’m sitting in this park, beside the statue of Peter Pan, writing to you…sincerely yours, Cayce Pollard.”
- Cayce is 32, her father dies on September 11th, 2001. She found footage and began to follow it. She has a severe allergic reaction to name brands and labels and an in-comprehensive ability to recognize urban trends.
- The way that Cayce interacts with the footage is that she follows it and talks to Parkaboy about it and then she began to work with Boone Shu to discover its source (they are both working for Bigend). Also, being a part of the forum gives her a feeling of belonging, and makes her feel like she has a second home.
- The reason she interacts is because it gives her something to focus on and gives her a feeling of belonging. She also does it because she is fascinated by how timeless it is, and she is trying to recognize patterns in the footage.
- Gitlin says, “The media has been smuggling the habit of living with the media….” This has a lot to do with Cayce and the forum. She constantly is coming back for more of the footage and the media is sucking her in. Cayce sees it as a job but it is her whole life, and that is what she bases her life on. She doesn’t realize that the media is sucking her in, she cannot even get away from it. Todd Gitlin i saying that the media does this to us, and Cayce is a perfectly good example of what Todd Gitlin is explaining. She is living through the “digital world.”
“Remember the whiteout, when they kiss?… Meanwhile, exhausted, baffled, but unhealthily excited, I remain, Parkaboy” (Gibson 170).
- Parkaboy is Cayce’s footagehead buddy and they spend countless hours analyzing the incoming clips. There isn’t much known about him, except that he resides in Chicago, is fond of Cayce, and has a Progressive viewpoint.
- He discusses the footage in the F:F:F and he emails Cayce for more elaborate analysis. As more clips are released he and fellow footagehead, Darryl, attempt to locate the creators. They come across Taki, a game designer, and create a fake female persona to attract him and extract the code which was found embedded in one of the clips. This passage is an email which Parkaboy sent to Cayce where he discusses, in depth, the watermarks which may have been embedded in other clips.
- Parkaboy interacts with the footage because he is fascinated by its timelessness. This turns into somewhat of an obsession as his desire to find the creators grows. The prospect of eventually discovering the people who filmed it, and the reason why they released it, is what motivates him to continue. He doesn’t have an economic stake in this and is mainly driven by curiosity and the intellectual and artistic aspects.
- The author of Media Unlimited, Todd Gitlin, would probably characterize “users” as people who search for “something we call fun, comfort, convenience, or pleasure…”(Gitlin 5) from the media. We see this in the character of Parkaboy because he is intrigued by the clips and spends his free time watching and analyzing them. Gitlin also states, “Even the quest for information includes the quest for the delight to be found in retrieving it, a quest, that is, for a feeling” (Gitlin 6). This is also evident in Parkaboy’s case because his quest to discover the meaning of the footage brings him a certain feeling of gratification. Every time he puts a piece of the puzzle together he is rewarded, even stating that he is “unhealthily excited” by their progress.
Advertisement
