Today, as I begin to talk about YouTube, I decided to write some positive sides of YouTube first. First of all, I would like to say that I myself like to watch videos on YouTube. I enjoy watching laughing babies, home-made cartoons, funny and lovely pets, the stupidity of young make jackasses, politicians, art projects and some documentaries. After all, I found that watching YouTube is an investigation into the world of ordinary people and their extraordinary online videos. Moreover, in my point of view, YouTube is a social space. It is not merely an archive of moving images. It is much more than a fast-growing collection of millions of home-made videos. It is an intense emotional experience. This virtual community reflects the cultural politics of the present times and thus is rife with both cooperation and conflict. Within YouTube community we can observe racist, sexist, homophobic, and verbally violent debates over elections, religion, and armed conflicts. However, sometimes, I feel YouTube is more like a repository of shared experiences. Here is my example; Disneyland Home Movies is a home movie of a family’s experience of Disneyland, shot sometime maybe in 1960s or 1970s. This clip was viewed on YouTube over 72,358 times and garnered 155 comments, all of which were positive in nature. The comments make it very clear that this home movie functions as a repository of shared experience. In this regard, one of the audiences of this video writes “Thanks for sharing this video! It brings back great memories from when I was little and went to Disneyland!” This is exactly what I feel sometimes when I watch others’ videos. Moreover, this video also functions as a source of historical knowledge for its viewers. And it also provides individuals with a way of confirming the accuracy of the memories of others, as is seen in Bethany4588’s reflection on how it matches her parents’ recollections: ‘my parents always talk about how Disneyland used to be, and thanks to you I can see it!” Our YouTube videos often capture the particular character of ourselves and our local culture while also reminding us of the universal nature of our everyday lives. The online audience often identifies with the presentation of universal while recoiling form local cultures that are not part of the mainstream. Thus, YouTube acts as a repository for idiosyncratic behavior, local culture, shared experience and collective memories. At the same time, YouTube presents a peculiar set of problems for the constructions of identity. It strips our memories of the context that gives them meaning and opens up our lives to misinterpretation.
More negative effects will be discussed in next blog... And here is the link to the video which I mentioned: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_DoPAQ3gJE Check it out if you are interested!
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