Hey, everybody. I’m Alice, a sophomore psychology major in Arts and Sciences. I’ve lived all over the country: Washington, Hawaii, Minnesota, Oklahoma, and New York. I’m a huge fan of figure skating, so if you know anything about skating, I will automatically like you. I absolutely love Coldplay, The Office, 80s music, and lame jokes. My boyfriend is also trying to get me interested in baseball (mainly the Mets). He still has a long way to go, but at least I can say that I’ve attended a Mets game.
An Internet phenomenon that I’ve always found interesting is Youtube. I had seen a few videos on Youtube before coming to Cornell, but I was not fully exposed to the site until I arrived in Ithaca for the first time last year, when I became friends with a guy who worshipped Youtube. His friends from home sent him links to videos daily, and he would always watch them and share them with his Cornell friends. Thanks to him, I started to appreciate Youtube for its beauty and ingenuity.
Youtube is a video site where anybody can upload their own homemade videos; in fact, its tagline is “Broadcast Yourself.” A large component of Youtube’s popularity is its accessibility. Anyone with a computer and Internet access can watch the videos on the site for free. Youtube does not fit any of Wallace’s defined online spaces. It’s a mixture of a media site with an asynchronous discussion forum. Of course, the main feature of the site is the videos that people post. However, sometimes the comments to videos are as entertaining as (and sometimes more so than) the videos themselves.
Youtube is always good for listening to music for free since it offers music videos; many people take advantage of this feature. If you look at the most viewed videos of all time on Youtube, a great number of them are music videos. I, on the other hand, have always been a big fan of the random videos that people make. People often come up with pointless videos that are guaranteed to make you laugh. In fact, some videos, like “Charlie the Unicorn” and “Average Homeboy,” have earned fame for their silliness.
But in addition to amazing stupidity, there are also fantastic works of creativity. The band OK Go earned worldwide attention when it broadcast a music video for its song “Here It Goes Again,” which features the band members dancing on treadmills. OK Go’s success explains part of the allure of posting a video on Youtube: if you put a video on the site, there’s always a chance that millions of people will watch and appreciate something that you’ve created.
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Hey Alice! I never really watched youtube till I got to Cornell also. I agree with you that it's a really entertaining site. But, I think youtube is both good and bad. Youtube is free advertisement; definately a good thing. I mean look at OK GO's video. They went from nobody to instant celebrities it seems like overnight. "Obama Girl's" video was pretty useful for Barak Obama too. The Obama Girl video helped the younger generation get involved and pay attention to the political debates. Youtube can really put your name out there to millions of people with the click of a button. However, it becomes a problem when people post embarrassing video's of people without there knowledge. That's never fun. For example, the really nasty fall that Beyonce took on stage was posted for a while (but they removed it now). That's pretty embarrassing for the whole world to see over and over again. So I guess there are some privacy issues with youtube but I'm sure they have some policies to try and prevent these sorts of things from being posted. Youtube is also bad when it become a procrastination tool....but that's just my own fault :b
p.s. you should go to Yankee's games instead
It wasn't until recently that I started watching the random videos that overpopulate the YouTube website. It began with music videos and guitar lessons, but now I will always find myself looking at random videos--something I hate because it takes up so much of my time! I am very enthusiastic about the political recognition that YouTube is getting as well (recently it was used during a political democratic debate). I think it is important to include this and other media like YouTube during a political campaign and during government because of the potential it brings to provoking governmental interest my generation and future generations. I like the expansiveness of this asynchronous website and the various creative aspects of it, however, like Dina mentioned, I think YouTube will face more legality problems in the future in terms of copyrights and privacy issues because of its age as a website and lack of sophistication. I think this website has the potential to be a real time consumer and I wonder how long it will take before large corporations find a way to use it to their advertising advantage (some already have: Geico)
P.S. GOOOOO METS!!!!!!!!
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