Amidst the laughing babies and spectacular soccer goals endlessly documented and dissected on YouTube, there are dozens of videos of paranormal phenomena: ghosts and poltergeists, aliens and reptoid news reporters. Some of them have amassed tens of millions of views. Together, they evoke an old relationship between technology and credulity: a kind of technological gnosticism.
There's a way in which many people see video as a means not only for documenting surfaces of daily life, but plumbing its depths. There's a sense in which the technology -- even, and perhaps especially, when at its glitchiest -- reveals unseen forces and governing spirits at work behind the veil of the quotidian. In the fuzzy, gremlin-haunted visual world of YouTube, paranoia and the paranormal have emerged as an aesthetic -- and perhaps as a mode of religious experience as well.
Among the videos in this shadowy genre are many pieces of straightforward fabrication, running the smeary gamut from hoax to figured fiction. With digital effects packages like Avid and After Effects bringing Hollywood magic within consumers' reach, millions of casual auteurs can fashion chilling spectacles ripe for viral proliferation. Some of YouTube's most popular videos feature digitally-enhanced scenelets of demonic possession; fleeting, Blair Witch-inspired mini-dramas of haunting and stalking; and apparitions of horrid faces and hands.