Response to "An Anthropological Intro to You Tube"

I recently watched "An Anthropological Intro to You Tube" by Michael Wesch on YouTube.com in my blogging class and I can't tell you how much it hit home for me.



Wesch discusses the phenomena of Youtube and user uploaded video versus the broadcasting of major television networks. The sheer amount of video is shocking. Over 200,000 videos are uploaded to Youtube each day and is mostly represented by three minute movies. Wesch says that most of these videos are only meant to have viewership of 100 people or less. Youtube opens up new forms of expression that are unprescendented in our time. A cultural blurp in Moldova can spread throughout the globe and make a kid in New Jersey famous or broadcast the fictional or real drama of a teenage girl (aka lonelygirl15) into a soap opera made for the unquenchable thirst of the internet consumer.

User-generated content has the ability to reach millions of people within a short time period and can generate exponential amounts of new media. These videos link space and time of the world audience. This community of new media generators are what Wesch calls "networked individualism." As we get cut off from a community based on location, the community based on peer-to-peer community based on internet connectivity is possible through mediums such as YouTube. This is a great tool for people who are deathly shy or afraid of normal social interaction. Sitting behind a camera can make these individuals less afraid of saying things they wouldn't normally say in public. It gives the individual a way of expressing themselves without constraints, and yet there are still the cultural constraints against certain forms of self-expression. Deep connection may be possible on YouTube, but I still think that it is somewhat superficial, that it is not real. In reality, Youtube is not really reality, but a distraction from your location to venture out into the unknown world. Youtube is a great way to reconnect oneself to a community and humanity, but you still have to be careful not to lose sight of your actual physical being and where you really are.