By Virginia Heffernan

HYPERACTIVE IN HOLLYWOOD

I’m in Hollywood, or the hyperactive off-brand Hollywood, with the

webisode producers and viral-video hype men.

I love these people, the ones trying to conjure some new miniscreen

legitimacy in a city that likes entertainment expensive, under control and

larger than life. Some of the online-video promoters sound as hopped up

on Web 2.0 goofballs as I am.

Although when, on a panel last night, one guy introduced himself as in charge of cell-phone content development for something or other, I couldn’t help but think that many of us have gone from (relatively) adventurous media-and-entertainment preoccupations to something that sounds like air-conditioner repair.

Why again are two-minute videos on screens the size of cigarette packs exciting?

Let’s recap.

Because haikus and weird miniature ivory carvings and a second’s interaction on the street can be exciting. Flashes of rage are exciting; displays of magic or virtuosity or turns of mood are exciting; instantaneous emotional contact is exciting; and the suggestion that anyone with a cheap camera, stuck and lost and jabbing desperately at keys all day (like all of us), can appear to the world through those screens, is exciting.

On the other hand.

How cell phone companies can cartel with record labels to overcharge for hip-hop ringtones so they can co-brand with content-aggregator initiatives to create entertainment verticals that allow for parallel advertising of other ringtones in the name of being “interactive” or doing “consumer-to-consumer” programming — this is not exciting. This kind of makes me want to kill myself.