YouTube killed the video that killed the radio star.
A few weeks ago, I sat in my friend’s basement on a futon that had three legs and a stack of moldy books holding it up. “You’ve gotta see this,” she said with a smirk, and whipped out a laptop that had a YouTube Web page already loaded on it.
We watched some Saturday Night Live sketch with Justin Timberlake singing about gift-wrapping a part of his anatomy for the holidays. How thoughtful of him.
I’ll admit, the video was entertaining. And while waiting for more people to show up at our gathering, we clicked around on YouTube.
I’m sure I don’t have to tell the average college student about all of the strange and amazing videos to be found on this revolutionary new site. People, usually young people, dance, and sing, and mime, and fight, and dish, and try on shoes, and commit all sorts of things to video, hoping to become one of the most popular on the site.
YouTube will probably be the next Web site to turn into a verb. Need to verify some information? Google it. Want to find a video where someone makes a complete ass of himself? YouTube it.
It’s a place where everyone can be a star, become famous. Just turn on a video camera, lip synch to your favorite Cher tune while eating a banana and wearing flippers, and slap that baby online. Everyone’s doing it. And everyone’s watching.
Shakespeare wrote, “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.” Now, I am highly suspect of the breeding of some of the people who can be viewed on YouTube, so that rules out the first means of achieving greatness. And making an idiotic video to be viewed by countless strangers certainly isn’t a great achievement – even Paris Hilton can do that.
That must only mean that they are having greatness thrust upon them. Who would do such a thing?
We all would, and do. But are we watching anything that deserves to have greatness thrust upon it, that deserves to be chronicled and quite possibly immortalized?
A phenomenon amongst Internet videos is that whenever anything slightly entertaining or clever sees a surge in popularity, scores of copycats spring up like mushroom colonies. And fungus is not known for its creativity. Imitation breeds imitation.
Recently, another video has seen its share of imitation: the execution of Saddam Hussein. People with camera phones were able to record the hanging of the former Iraqi dictator recently convicted of crimes against humanity. The graphic videos spread, like fungus.
To date, there have been at least seven children who have died by hanging since Hussein’s execution, in the United States and around the world. Presumably, they were imitating what they had seen on those videos that got out.
What we record, distribute, and use to entertain ourselves has taken on a whole new dimension. We trivialize the human experience by committing every mundane or inane act that we can think of to video, only for it to be gawked at by viewers just as nameless as we are. Then, when we see something truly monumental, its impact is weakened. It’s only a video, right?
YouTube certainly isn’t to blame for the deaths of these boys, whose ages ranged from 9 to 13. Some of them might never have even heard of YouTube.
But perhaps their tragedies will allow us to be a bit more discerning about what it means to be “great,” and how that status is achieved.
Because everyone knows that the real stars of the Internet are bloggers.
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