Microsoft’s “megawoosh”: a faked waterslide jump got millions of YouTube views.
To see this and seven other top "faked" moments of the decade click here.
How to sum up the noughties? Perhaps by showing the YouTube clip of a man careering down a giant water slide, flying over the ramp lip, and travelling 200ft in a perfect arc across a deserted valley, only to land in a tiny paddling pool. It seemed a miraculous stunt, in which the slightest miscalculation would see the prankster splattered onto the hillside. The clip seized the popular imagination in August, attracting over 1.4m views across the world in its first week.
Within days, it was revealed to be a fake—spliced videos, ropes and dummies—funded by Microsoft as a viral video to promote a software package. Of course it was, we thought. Who could have thought otherwise? But, in the moment, those thousands of viewers loved rewatching and half-believing that a man could megawoosh. As Douglas Adams would have said: the stunt wasn’t entirely impossible, just highly improbable. It was a moment of fleeting plausibility.
We should have been sceptical, because the megawoosh viral was not alone. In 2005, a video clip of Brazilian footballer Ronaldinho apparently hitting the crossbar of a goal four times in a row, each time catching the rebound perfectly on his head or chest, earned millions of views—even after it was revealed to be a Nike advert. Next came the increasingly eerie entries of a video diary posted on YouTube by a teenager with the screen-name lonelygirl15. They gathered a cult following before being eventually outed as the fictional calling cards of three aspiring filmmakers.
All fakes, all plausible: virtual watercooler moments for the 21st century, their integrity secondary to their capacity to provoke debate. After all, these sometimes turn out to be the real deal: the Sony Bravia television advert really did set 250,000 balls bouncing down a street in San Francisco. And the online diaries of blue-chip call girl Belle de Jour were confirmed in November as the authentic memoirs of a cash-strapped postgraduate.
Of course, this tendency wasn’t exploited simply so that people could sell us computers and televisions and Billie Piper in her knickers. There was something similar in the things-can-only-get-better delirium of the 1997 election, and a few years later in the notion that Saddam had WMDs. It may be too soon to judge whether Obama came in on a similar tide, but “change we can believe in” is looking a little megawooshy right now.
Ours is supposed to be a dour and cynical age. Politicians and bankers are deemed to have the basest and most venal intentions. Climate change deniers and 9/11 conspiracy nuts pick away not just at our perceptions of reality but also our faith in institutions and people. And since the dinosaurs first rampaged through Jurassic Park in 1993, the increasing sophistication of technologies such as CGI and Photoshop have meant that, more than ever, we can’t believe the evidence of our own eyes.
Yet this was also the decade in which we allowed ourselves to believe, for a while at least, the silliest, most implausible narratives. Or to put it more clearly, we allowed ourselves the pleasure of half-belief—which, especially when a million people are doing it with you, is one of the most deliciously satisfying human emotions.
Is it plausible, for instance, that the judges on the television show Britain’s Got Talent didn’t know that frumpy spinster Susan Boyle had such an extraordinary voice? Of course not: but only after we’d allowed ourselves to wallow in the strangeness of the business did we blink and let ourselves see the calculating glint in Simon Cowell’s eye. These kinds of fiction can be contagious, too—witness the American parents who, soon after the release of the latest Pixar movie Up, fabricated the tale of their six-year-old son floating away from his Colorado home in a balloon.
So why has this age of fleeting plausibility come about? Perhaps these things (and especially the contrived media-driven hoaxes) work because they fill the gap left when so many of our belief systems began to crumble, from the middle of the last century. In the age of the internet, it’s also all too easy to debunk the integrity of miracles and public figures alike—and yet there remains an almost hardwired human desire to vanquish our own cynicism, to believe in something in spite of ourselves.
Of course, sometimes we never truly get fooled in the first place. People know horoscopes are baloney, but lord help the glossy magazine that neglects to include one. Neither parent nor child really believes in Santa, but both play along, if only to keep the other happy. When we watch a conjuring trick, we know it’s not “magic” per se, but we still wonder at the mystery involved. And, perversely, we need to know how it’s done, even though that will spoil the fun.
It is this process of curiosity, of playing along, which is at work here—not so much the death of credulity, as its reinvention. Just as Microsoft and Nike and Simon Cowell know they’re going to be found out, a moment of half-belief is better than no belief at all. Mere truth, banal as it feels, has its place. Give people something suitably incredible, though, and they’ll share it with the world. If the past decade has sometimes made us feel that things are flying out of control, it’s comforting to believe there’s a strategically placed paddling pool at the other end.
To see this and seven other top "faked" moments of the decade click here.
How to sum up the noughties? Perhaps by showing the YouTube clip of a man careering down a giant water slide, flying over the ramp lip, and travelling 200ft in a perfect arc across a deserted valley, only to land in a tiny paddling pool. It seemed a miraculous stunt, in which the slightest miscalculation would see the prankster splattered onto the hillside. The clip seized the popular imagination in August, attracting over 1.4m views across the world in its first week.
Within days, it was revealed to be a fake—spliced videos, ropes and dummies—funded by Microsoft as a viral video to promote a software package. Of course it was, we thought. Who could have thought otherwise? But, in the moment, those thousands of viewers loved rewatching and half-believing that a man could megawoosh. As Douglas Adams would have said: the stunt wasn’t entirely impossible, just highly improbable. It was a moment of fleeting plausibility.
We should have been sceptical, because the megawoosh viral was not alone. In 2005, a video clip of Brazilian footballer Ronaldinho apparently hitting the crossbar of a goal four times in a row, each time catching the rebound perfectly on his head or chest, earned millions of views—even after it was revealed to be a Nike advert. Next came the increasingly eerie entries of a video diary posted on YouTube by a teenager with the screen-name lonelygirl15. They gathered a cult following before being eventually outed as the fictional calling cards of three aspiring filmmakers.
All fakes, all plausible: virtual watercooler moments for the 21st century, their integrity secondary to their capacity to provoke debate. After all, these sometimes turn out to be the real deal: the Sony Bravia television advert really did set 250,000 balls bouncing down a street in San Francisco. And the online diaries of blue-chip call girl Belle de Jour were confirmed in November as the authentic memoirs of a cash-strapped postgraduate.
Of course, this tendency wasn’t exploited simply so that people could sell us computers and televisions and Billie Piper in her knickers. There was something similar in the things-can-only-get-better delirium of the 1997 election, and a few years later in the notion that Saddam had WMDs. It may be too soon to judge whether Obama came in on a similar tide, but “change we can believe in” is looking a little megawooshy right now.
Ours is supposed to be a dour and cynical age. Politicians and bankers are deemed to have the basest and most venal intentions. Climate change deniers and 9/11 conspiracy nuts pick away not just at our perceptions of reality but also our faith in institutions and people. And since the dinosaurs first rampaged through Jurassic Park in 1993, the increasing sophistication of technologies such as CGI and Photoshop have meant that, more than ever, we can’t believe the evidence of our own eyes.
Yet this was also the decade in which we allowed ourselves to believe, for a while at least, the silliest, most implausible narratives. Or to put it more clearly, we allowed ourselves the pleasure of half-belief—which, especially when a million people are doing it with you, is one of the most deliciously satisfying human emotions.
Is it plausible, for instance, that the judges on the television show Britain’s Got Talent didn’t know that frumpy spinster Susan Boyle had such an extraordinary voice? Of course not: but only after we’d allowed ourselves to wallow in the strangeness of the business did we blink and let ourselves see the calculating glint in Simon Cowell’s eye. These kinds of fiction can be contagious, too—witness the American parents who, soon after the release of the latest Pixar movie Up, fabricated the tale of their six-year-old son floating away from his Colorado home in a balloon.
So why has this age of fleeting plausibility come about? Perhaps these things (and especially the contrived media-driven hoaxes) work because they fill the gap left when so many of our belief systems began to crumble, from the middle of the last century. In the age of the internet, it’s also all too easy to debunk the integrity of miracles and public figures alike—and yet there remains an almost hardwired human desire to vanquish our own cynicism, to believe in something in spite of ourselves.
Of course, sometimes we never truly get fooled in the first place. People know horoscopes are baloney, but lord help the glossy magazine that neglects to include one. Neither parent nor child really believes in Santa, but both play along, if only to keep the other happy. When we watch a conjuring trick, we know it’s not “magic” per se, but we still wonder at the mystery involved. And, perversely, we need to know how it’s done, even though that will spoil the fun.
It is this process of curiosity, of playing along, which is at work here—not so much the death of credulity, as its reinvention. Just as Microsoft and Nike and Simon Cowell know they’re going to be found out, a moment of half-belief is better than no belief at all. Mere truth, banal as it feels, has its place. Give people something suitably incredible, though, and they’ll share it with the world. If the past decade has sometimes made us feel that things are flying out of control, it’s comforting to believe there’s a strategically placed paddling pool at the other end.
