Anthropology of YouTube

I like this Michael Wesch guy. I like that he is funny. I like that he is positive, optimistic. He makes some good points - like the fact that YouTube is not immoral although it has a reputation of being such.  For many people, watching YouTube videos and even having parties for the purpose of watching YouTube videos is a huge waste of time.  However, Wesch argues that YouTube is significant. Indeed, in the last video of the man who lost his newborn to SIDS, YouTube was significant in his healing. That is amazing and wonderful all at the same time.  More than anything I think YouTube is full of contradictions.  The cultural inversion stuff that he pointed out...we long to be individuals but desire community. We are surrounded by commercialism yet value authenticity. It seems that we don't know what we want - but we are playing out all of this uncertainty on this global stage of YouTube. 

I learned some pretty cool things - like Soulja Boy was user-generated content! Had no clue...  One of those many videos of random people doing the Soulja Boy dance very well could have been my high school - our administrators & teachers would dance to it during break in the lobby, our football team led it during a pep rally until... we found out what the lyrics meant :( .

I love that someone is studying the YouTube phenomenon and am sure that academic study will spread to other areas such as FB, blogosphere, Twitter, etc.  We are documenting our history, the happy, the sad. I always ask my students, "Who writes history?" It used to be that the answer was the victor, the most powerful, the wealthiest.  Web 2.0 is changing all of that - really for the first time - anyone can write history.  After I typed in Alexander Central in YouTube, a lot of videos came up about one football player in particular who is not all that good, not a team leader, just average. Whoever is putting up these videos, highlighting this player's tackles and other plays, are documenting him when others aren't being documented. If someone stumbles upon this, what impression does it give? Which lends us to revisit that same dillema - is YouTube real or fake? Is any media real or fake? Can we really expect our students to trust our textbooks - aren't they simply the compilation of someone else's version of history? What will they see through our user-generated content of today?  I hope they see the same world that Michael Wesch sees - a world of hope and promise. "One World"