WHAT IS YOU-TUBE? - Vlog - Corey Vidal

Hi! My name is Corey, and if you're watching this video right now there is a really good chance you've heard of a website called: YouTube. YouTube was started in February of 2005 and one of the reasons it did so well so fast was because it allowed anyone to upload an unlimited number of videos and watch as many videos as they wanted for free. 

As YouTube has grown, all of the features they've added to the website have also been free. And as I think about the many changes they've made to YouTube over the years - some good and some not so good - it does become obvious that there's one thing at the forefront of everybody YouTube experience: interactions. 

Your interactions are everything you do aside from actually watching a video. Rating videos, leaving comments, subscribing, making playlists - these are all things you do to YouTube that changes YouTube to fit you. I guess that's why they call it YouTube. But I find the word 'interaction' starts to lose its meaning after a while. It's this new buzzword that's trying to force you to join every single social media site and connect all of your profiles to everything else so everything you do is connected. So you can't browse, or breath, or eat, or sleep without sharing absolutely everything you do with everyone. 

I think that something that much more accurately describes my relationship with the website I'm using and the videos I'm watching is not 'interactions.' They're connections. You see, 'cuz when I watch a video on YouTube it's not a lean-back experience the way television and movies are. YouTube is a much more lean-forward experience where I'm not just watching a video, I'm reading the comments and I'm clicking on the annotations and I'm looking at the related videos and seeing what other people have to say. And by me connecting to YouTube, to the videos I watch and the people that make them, I am engaging in a type of connection that was never possible before the Internet. 

You see, because YouTube is a new form of media and it gets quickly defined that way when people compare it to television and film and radio. Oh, YouTube is the new t.v.! And there's this big comparison between new media and traditional media, as if YouTube is going to somehow replace television. Well, guess what? For hundreds of years, the theatre was the primary form of produced entertainment. 

Then in August of 1877 Thomas Edison completed his first phonograph, a new invention that would allow the recording of audio for the first time in human history. But what seems like such an incredible progression of human invention was not met as warmly as you might expect. You see, up until this point in time, every musician that ever performed ever had to do so live. There was no such thing as recording audio. So to have a musician be able to be recorded and then play that back without the musician being needed felt like piracy. 

And believe it or not, a lot of people thought, "This is the end of live music." And again with the invention of the motion picture, the ability to film something and then play that something back, meant of course, theater is dead! And then when television came out, people were able to take the theatrical experience and put it in their homes. So of course then, movies are dead! Time has proven to us that theater, radio, television, and film haven't gone anywhere. So even in a world where YouTube might become your or Is primary form of media I don't think it's fair to say that older forms of media are dead. YouTube is just a new form of media, one of our favorite kinds of media. 

But when we look back at the interaction that we were talking about earlier, you realize that the video portion of YouTube is only one small part of the site. You see, because while YouTube is a form of media, it's also something bigger than that. YouTube is a form of communication. Now don't get me wrong, television and film are a form of communication too. However, for the past hundred years most forms of produced media were being done so in a top down structure. That means that the studios and the networks and record labels produced the content and then you chose what content you wanted to consume. If you didn't like this show, maybe you'll like this show. And you don't like this movie, maybe you'll like this movie. But either way, we didn't have much say in the creation of the content. We just sat back, consumed and handed over our money. 

But now things are different. It is not top down anymore, it is bottom up. We are living in a time where anyone who has access to a camera and an Internet connection can put something online and have it seen by the entire world. For the first time in human history the playing field is equal. And what are we doing with this opportunity? We are creating, and we are communicating. We are investing our time in entertainment, in film making, in blogging, in pets, in gaming and teaching, but most importantly we are investing our time in each other. And these connections and these communications and these investments are the best thing that has ever happened to me. YouTube isn't a website that I visit, it's a community where I live. Thank you guys for watching. Click the thumbnail on the left to see more of my videos or the thumbnail on the right to be taken to a different channel where I post daily blogs. You guys are awesome. I'll see you again soon. Bye.