Youtube Nation: The DigiTour

Even though it's everywhere, the Internet still isn't fully integrated with reality. It will be one day, but it's far from flesh as of 2011. The gap is closing more every year and I imagine that when it no longer exists as the default state of being in the modern world, we won't notice until we realize that a person has to make a conscious decision to disconnect. That's going to be a strange time and it'll make me feel like an old man when I'll undoubtedly look on with disdain as the first fully integrated generation refuses to experience a perfectly serviceable day of sunshine sans tech. That day hasn't come yet and the culture of the Internet is still niche. It's making forays into the flesh, though. Case in point: The DigiTour.

The DigiTour has been going on for a while now. It's a touring live show of Youtube musicians like The Gregory Brothers, David Choi and Mystery Guitar Man, among others. The format is a little strange, all things considered. A lot of the acts are projecting the Youtube videos corresponding to the set list while they play over the original audio. It's like a major label band screening their music videos while they play live instruments on top of the studio tracks.

This has resulted in some confusion on my part, mostly because I want to understand why people are attending the DigiTour. There's no doubt that the acts are real, talented musicians. For a lot of them, Youtube began as a promotional tool for their more traditional music careers. These days, it seems like Youtube is the career and the studio work and live shows are the supplements. The format of the DigiTour makes this bizarre switch more pronounced.

This makes me wonder whose decision it was to format the show as live-with-projection. It would make sense for it to be Youtube's call. The company is the primary sponsor, after all. So, unless the good people at Lugz have strong opinions about how to put on a live music show, I'd say that Youtube wants to make sure that some of their most prominent properties can never really distance themselves from the medium.

If the musicians themselves chose the odd format, though, it's a different animal altogether. Youtube is, for all its pervasiveness in our culture, still a niche thing. Just like an actress who stars in science fiction TV shows is highly likely to find herself only ever receiving offers for more sci-fi roles, Youtube celebrities have a hard time achieving the escape velocity required to be entertainers independent of Youtube. I know that if I was a working musician, being beholden to Youtube to maintain my career would make me feel, at best, like a second-string performer. I certainly wouldn't choose to accentuate my shackles, so there's an air of resignation to anyone who would.

As for the fans themselves, they've found themselves in a highly surreal circumstance. While it would be delightfully and harmlessly geeky to, say, attend a live show of Youtube musicians presenting their material in a bare-bones, acoustic performance, it's odd and borderline pointless to watch those same artists vying for attention with their own videos. But maybe the audience isn't really there to see the stars. Maybe they bought tickets to hang out in real life with other fans, to see the Likes/Dislikes counter represented in the flesh. It's as if they're all saying, "I like that video. You like that video, too? Hooray, we are a community!" Whether you see that as a postmodern absurdity or a sign of the Internet's ability to connect people will likely determine how well you react to that inevitable sunny day when all the kids are on augmented reality.