On YouTube, fun comes first and truth second

Published 11:18 pm Saturday, April 5, 2008

Warning: If you’re my age or so, you’ll start reading this, may or may not finish it, but end up thinking, “Huh? I don’t get it.”

In my mind, that’s the point.

Lots of us over a certain age don’t get it.

What’s so funny and all-consuming about posting stuff on YouTube?

Read all the way to the end, you still may not quite understand who PawLy P is, what he did, and why I should care.

You may, though, have a better idea of how a generation raised on the Internet sees the world and plays by new rules.

So here goes:

PawLy P told me by phone from Cheney last week that his real name is Pawl Fisher, although his e-mail identifies its sender as Paul Fisher. Whatever. Truth hardly matters when it’s all about fun.

Fisher, a 22-year-old senior at Eastern Washington University and 2004 graduate of Everett’s Cascade High School, said his goal these days is to rack up a million hits on his campy YouTube video. “This morning it was almost at 600,000,” he said Wednesday.

Before describing Fisher’s video, I need to tell you about this thing called “rickrolling.” (Skip this part if you’re young — you already know.)

Rickrolling — there was an earlier version called duckrolling — is an e-mail prank. It’s done by sending what appears to be a link to something worth seeing, but what the e-mail recipient actually finds is a 1987 music video of the song “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley, erstwhile British pop singer.

I’d never heard of Astley. In 1987, I was home with a newborn, listening to U2’s “The Joshua Tree.” Rick Astley looks a little like a dorky, blond imitation of Tom Cruise in “Risky Business.” Are you with me so far?

In the real world, not the virtual or celluloid worlds, is Fisher.

He’s at EWU studying electronic media and film.

“I’ve got a minor in government,” said the college senior, who also makes music videos for rappers. His dream job is to be a feature film editor.

He’s off to a funny but sneaky start.

Not only was his YouTube video the subject of a March 24 article in The New York Times, the video’s content and its creator fooled New York Times reporter Evelyn Nussenbaum.

The article was trying to explain the rickrolling phenomenon, and the headline said: “The ’80s Video That Pops Up, Online and Off.”

Taken at face value (you can see the video by going to YouTube.com and searching for “ewupawly”), Fisher’s clip shows an EWU women’s basketball game — complete with cheerleaders and a small crowd in the bleachers — being interrupted by a guy dressed as Astley lip-synching the ’80s hit.

The New York Times reported it as happening just that way, quoting Fisher as saying, “I want people to rickroll even bigger events, like the Super Bowl.”

After the Times reported the video as fact, Spokane’s KHQ-TV news and Spokesman-Review newspaper revealed what folks who attended the game already knew: There was no rickroll in the gym.

Fisher played a film-editing trick.

Online, The New York Times article now includes a correction, blaming the erroneous report “on information provided by Pawl Fisher, a student; Davin Perry, who shoots games videos for the university; and Dave Cook, its sports information director.”

The Spokesman-Review article begins: “It’s not the first time a newspaper has been punk’d.”

Punk’d? That ain’t exactly speaking my language. I’d say The New York Times was lied to. And I think that’s a big deal — a big, bad deal.

To Fisher, it’s no big deal.

His deceit?

“I don’t have a problem with it,” Fisher said. “Everybody is bashing The New York Times, but over 300,000 people fell for it in the first week. It’s not like I lied about something significant. I didn’t lie to anybody to go to war or something like that. The goal is to entertain people on the Internet, to make people laugh.”

Fisher is quite capable of making people laugh.

He’s skilled. That video took some doing, and lots of time.

“It was made over several games,” he said. “One game, we’d show up and get a shot, then go back for fill-in shots. It did happen, in the sense that those are real reactions. I used a bunch of cameras. The audio is all post-edit, and I added reverb.”

I’m clueless about that sort of thing. Fisher sounds like a smart guy racing toward a bright future.

And the point of telling you all this? Like I wrote at the top, I don’t get it.

Get this, though. While those of us on the older side of today’s generation gap get news from places like The New York Times and other newspapers — and trust that the sources for the news we rely on are truth-tellers — PawLy P said he never looks at a newspaper.

“I get my news from YouTube,” Fisher said.

Wow, think of that.

They know what rickrolling is, members of this YouTube generation. What’s scary is all that they don’t know.

Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlstein@heraldnet.com.