Why All the Media Has it All Wrong about Google's YouTube
YouTube
is just the latest salvo in the case of media eating itself big time. So much more is coming: collaborative editing, dynamic documentary, hyperfilm, panopticon, WikiPedia Media... Imagine what this can mean for Shifting personal, local and global consciousness!
My personal feeling is that we are beginning to experience the reknitting together of our lost and fractionated fabric of culture and wisdom atom by atom in the nanotechnological loom of internetworked dynamism. We are seeing the physics of consciousness at work... that what you see is what you look for through the manifesting power of attraction.
Surely we are also about to see a lot of light and truth being shone into innumerable dark areas where legions of powermongers have been able to keep Big Media Eyes blinded and Mouths muzzled. And the march of truth and light is always a good thing.
But Big Media seems to miss what the YouTube phenomenon is about, perhaps because it is the exact inverse of Big Media. The reality is literally invisible to their frame. So naturally, Big Media is reporting about the size of the deal without doing justice to the fascinating inversion of all the key relationships it thinks are the rules of the game: Winner Take All becomes Longtail; expensive "professional" formulaic production becomes whatever works; stars become everyman; timeslots become the eternal now; the elite director becomes some guy you know or who's just like you; the short list of behemoth channels become millions and millions of personal ones; and writing becomes curiously irrelevant.
Perhaps most importantly, "what we want to see" is actually determined by what we want to see instead of by some cabal of cynical tastemakers with a dim and predatory view of humanity. That said, apparently some of what "we want to see" is in fact, pretty dim. Other fare, however, is historically or intellectually or humanistically priceless.
Here's a great blog from Steve Rosenbaum on Huffpo that explains Why All the Media Has it All Wrong about Google/YouTube.
