More on “iCarly”…

5 September 2007 | Community, Culture, Eventness, Internet, Media, TV & Movies | Comments

Back in mid-July, a short L.A. Times item about Nickelodeon’s new iCarly series caught my eye.

Today, USA Today has a substantial article about the show.

One new tidbit of information is that the website will have longer versions of the user-submitted video than what air on TeenNICK, which brings to my mind some questions of authenticity, pace Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” When both versions air, which is the official one? Which has authority over the other? Or that very question an indication of my mediafuddyduddiness?

Show creator Dan Schneider has this to say:

Now, technology can make that a reality, and iCarly has a format that invites user participation, he says. “Ever since the Internet hit, every pitch for a TV show says it has a Web element, but they really didn’t offer anything other than the very obvious stuff, like behind-the-scenes photos and interviews,” he says. In iCarly, “we have the convergence angle between TV and the Internet, and we have user-generated content.”

I’m setting my TiVo for this one.