YouTube as a Cultural Impactor
What the television set was to over-the-air video, YouTube has been for over-the-Internet video. Not only in the sense of creating a new standard for consuming video productions, but moreover in the sense of creating a new way of behaving entirely.
YouTube is the Internet writ large, in living color. The baby days of the World Wide Web were a series of explosions of novelty - since all space then was whitespace - and YouTube, as a service dependent upon said Web, is the most novel of all. With personal technology allowing easy creation of high-quality video and professional-level editing - not to mention the ubiquity of broadband Internet access - the stage was set for some entity or another to be the useful platform on which video-based social networking and digital marketing can take place.
Read the well-researched and well-written article by Kristy Simon in 2015 when she explores the “participatory culture of the Internet age” as made most possible by YouTube. It’s at versiondaily.com/youtube-and-the-participatory-culture-in-the-internet-age. Even back in 2008, when YouTube was only three years old, scholarly work was already being done to examine the burgeoning new platform’s anthropological effects. The rather enjoyable and entertaining 55-minute presentation is at youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU.
Now it’s a platform for everything from sports (youtube.com/watch?v=ld9HllqAvpk) to news (youtube.com/watch?v=P4xrQiW2PXQ) to weird stuff (youtube.com/watch?v=-DE6suatnhY).
YouTube isn’t TV. TV is produced and distributed. YouTube is made and put out there. Even the big-volume channels have a touch of amateurism about them, lending to their authenticity and ingratiating them to their audience as relatable. YouTube can be fun. TV can be work.
See also Barry Beck for more interesting stories.
