In late , the writer John Green came up with the idea of communicating with his brother, Hank, for a year solely through videos posted to YouTube. They communicated mainly through instant messaging. Like the best realistic Y.
His protagonists were sweetly intellectual teen-age boys smitten with complicated, charismatic girls. Although the books were funny, their story lines propelled by spontaneous road trips and outrageous pranks, they displayed a youthfully insatiable appetite for big questions: What is an honorable life?
How do we wrest meaning from the unexpected death of someone close to us? Teen-agers feel that what you conclude about those questions is going to matter.
He found the experience almost too sad to bear, and decided that such a life was not for him. The YouTube project was, in part, an attempt to fill that void. It was also a smart marketing stunt, though Green could not have predicted how smart.
He gets frustrated easily. The Greens started posting videos several times a week, under the name the Vlogbrothers. The project was less a conversation than an extended form of parallel play. The brothers had signature preoccupations, which they discussed with excitable urgency, talking into the camera at tremendous speed. John discussed books, existential anxiety, and pizza; Hank was into science, math, and corn dogs.
