The Study of a Culture - The YouTube Culture

No this is not the "Charlie bit me" video. This is Mike Wesch's presentation to the Library of Congress entitled "An anthropological introduction to YouTube." Mike is the creator of the now famous video - Web 2.0 Explained. This presentation really speaks to how widespread YouTube is and the notion of video blogs (vlogs) as a culture for how as a people we connect to others.
Mike shares his study of this culture known as YouTube.



This is obviously the largest growing media form of our age and growing. And now, there are even more web resources that offer video uploading and distribution; sites such as Vimeo, OneTrue Media, and many others offers the ability to upload and share video. Most social networks like Ning, MySpace, Facebook, WeAreTeachers and others also offer the ability to upload and share videos within their own communities. But what's more amazing is not only the posting of the videos onto these various online communities, but the number of hits / views these videos get - we all have our favorites. And so how do these get widespread? Just as I am doing now - by embedding a YouTube video and commenting on it. Mike speaks to this concept and posts to Digg or Technorati and other web services contribute to this.

This is an amazing a video with the good, the bad, the ugly of YouTube, but it is real and it is a part of our culture And, while YouTube does have it's 'drama' and not all video/language is good, it is a community of all of us from all ages. As with all forms of media, this is something that has it's controversies and filtering; hence, the probable reason many schools block YouTube from it's students.

If you have a some time, sit and watch this and reflect. This has conjured up a lot of thought provoking ideas and questions for me that even as I blog here in my office by myself, just this post is part of that culture which goes out to so many (okay maybe 3 of you) but can go anywhere and can be interpreted differently by each one of you.

The take away for me is that we are all part of this 'One World' and that we all have a voice and that we all still want to connect even in this virtual society called YouTube.