40daysofdating: An awesome new kind of long-form story telling Aug 5th 2013, 01:10
5 mins ago Aug. 4, 2013 – 12:16 PM PDT
40daysofdating is a website that combines text, photos and video to tell the story of two friends Jessica Walsh and Timothy Goodman who after failing at finding love, are dating each other and sharing the experience. It is like reality television, except fro the web.
What do two designers — one a man, another a woman — both friends based in New York do when they continued relationship problems and have a tough time finding the love of their life? Well, they embark on an experiment — they date each other and will do so for 40 days — and share their story with millions of strangers on the web. The two designers are Jessica Walsh and Timothy Goodman and they are telling their daily dating stories on their joint website – 40daysofdating. The experiment started on July 10, 2013 and will end on August 22, 2013. It is one of the most addictive and amazing "reality" web series I have read. (Don't worry there is TV too, except its videos on Vimeo.) I am following their lives closely and their website has become a daily read for me.
My own obsession with the lives of these two strangers aside, a project such as 40daysofdating is a reminder of the creative possibilities of the Internet. When we as media creators treat web and mobile as their own individual and brand new mediums we almost always end up creating brand new media forms, one's that have not be appropriated from the past and retrofitted for today's digital reality. Needless to say, we have barely scratched the surface. At some level, 40daysofdating is like reality television, reality web if you may, and a good signpost for what could be a more episodic approach to content and story telling. In the past, it was comic books and stories in noir magazines that kept you hooked. So why not, the web-based episodic story telling!
And as for Jessica and Tim — a hopeless romantic that I am, I am rooting for them to find true love and live happily every after!
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