You Tube - Public Television

The more I follow the circuitous pathways from comments to YouTubers' profiles to their favorite videos to that persons' posted videos, the more I'm sure that YouTube is not about being entertained or enlightened in the traditional sense but about finding people who are similar to you. YouTube is unlike so many other online video sites b/c its primarily used as a social networking tool.

People seek out media that espouses viewpoints consonant with their own all the time, but when it comes to film, TV, and music, they've had pretty limited choices. I don't think you could find this video of kids blowing stuff up on any other medium. The closest thing might be Maximum Exposure on TV, which features the obligatory "don't try this at home, kids" voice, but mostly makes a mockery of attempts to temper the audience's delight in watching carnage.

So there are people on YouTube watching other people get hurt, or blow shit up, and then there are people watching "9/11 is an inside job" docs. There are people watching ironic mashups, and there are people making earnest fan tribute videos to soap opera characters. In short, there is nothing remotely resembling a cultural, moral, or aesthetic consensus on YouTube (other than a universal bias towards youth). Unlike TV, this is not a storytelling medium (even reality shows, which favor lifestyle and culture over story, possess narratives). Its enough to simply signify who you are by posting of montage of you and your friends blowing stuff up.

When someone says "I hate your video," what they really seem to be saying is "I hate you," or at least "I mock your value system." Again, I think what separates YouTube from traditional media is the extent to which our preferences and production of media represents ourselves. I can share this person's love of Slayer and Slipknot, but I think that blowing shit up is a dangerous, annoying attempt to assert one's diminishing authority in the face of a modernized world in which the person in question can't fit in or compete. I'm relatively sure that said person would think I was a stuck-up prick for thinking so. But that's the variety of opinions that we're dealing with online.

Certainly, YouTubers still have some overlapping interests. One Tuber may seem to be exclusively interested in Cameros and explosions, but his preference for a comedy sketch might put him in the same audience as someone who hates Cameros and is indifferent towards explosions. It would appear that diversity of lifestyle and value system within a fan group is less prevalent on YouTube than it is w/ other media, but the linked nature and the search function (and what people choose for tags, and the fact that the middle frame of each video represents it) connect diverse viewers in ways that cable TV - with its certain channels for certain interests - doesn't.

Something tells me that diversity of one's media diet depended on two things:

• A paternalistic media oligarchy that deemed certain types of diversity of values reflected in our media to be necessary for civic health (the high-minded ideals behind public TV programming)
• Imperfect search technology that gives us some of what we're looking for, but also some things that we weren't looking for.
  

We can even search for people, but those people have some values we agree with, and others we don't (just as in real life), and that's good. But what happens when no one is there to impose diversity? What happens when the search technology gets so good that no one has to be confronted by values they don't agree with? I can't shake this nebulous fear that we'll all hate each other a little bit more in the future.