I was recently reading an article that claimed that the Blair Witch Project movie stunt was one of the most successful buzz and viral stunts ever! But would this stunt work today? Or would the power of the Internet destroy it? Has the Internet killed the magic of not knowing? And will this destroy the dreams of children this Christmas?

Making millions of dollars from a movie that cost just $60,000 to make is quite an achievement, The Blair Witch did this by creating fake documentaries and making people think that the movie was real.

This got me thinking…

What if this movie was released in 2008 instead of 1999? Would it still have the same effect?

Well, there is no doubt that things can go viral faster and with more power today than in 1999, and Blair Witch was mainly spread through offline word of mouth and the media.

Today I suspect that the fake vids and documentaries would have been put on Youtube, and they would have also been frontpage news at Digg.com, there is no doubt that it would have become global news much quicker…

However,

We are much better at using the Internet than we were in 1999, and thanks to Google we are all private detectives and researchers, so there is a good chance that the Internet would have destroyed the buzz campaign early on.

No doubt someone somewhere would have researched the guy who uploaded the Youtube video, or found one of the actors on Facebook, and the whole thing would have been destroyed overnight.

In many ways this power that we have at our fingertips is a great thing, it helps us find better deals, it helps us locate useful information… but does it not also kill the magic of not knowing? Wasn’t most of the magic of Blair Witch the possibility that maybe, just maybe it really did happen?

So Has The Internet Killed The Magic of Christmas?

I remember when I was 4 years old, it was Christmas eve, and I asked my mother if I could have a camera under my pillow so that I could try and take a photo of Santa Claus. She obliged, and I was really excited and nervous… looking back, this was part of the magic of Christmas, part of the mystery and charm of the day.

But in 2008 any child could do a simple Google search for: Does Santa Claus Exist? and the number one result is a physics article explaining how the gifts would burn in the atmosphere, thus making it impossible.

Sorry kids…. blame Google!