Time, the magazine that declared YouTube as the Person of the Year in 2006, recently released a list of YouTube’s top fifty videos. How this list was determined we do not know, but it is a marker of current tastes that merits attention.
In Time‘s list of YouTube’s top fifty videos fifteen are commercial productions, such as clips from news broadcasts, television shows, and music videos. Seven are made by semi-professional entertainers, such as the YouTube child star behind the Fred show. Over half, twenty-eight, are amateur videos featuring a wide range of subjects, from babies, children, puppets, assorted animals, and home-made music videos.
While it is only five years old, YouTube continues to demonstrate that we are entranced by content coming from amateur videographers. This defies long held expectations within the media industry that only professionals would be able to develop and deliver content that would attract a mass audience. Indeed, amateur content may yet prove to be a serious source of fragmentation and competition for eyeballs within the media ecology. Exact numbers are not yet available, but I strongly suspect that amateurs account for the majority of the 25 hours of video that is upload every minute to YouTube.
There are far more amateurs armed with video cameras than there are sources of professional content production. There are literally billions of amateur photographers and videographers in the world today, along with 1.7 billion Internet users. This means that we have entered into a fundamentally different paradigm of cultural production – one in which amateurs account for the majority of video-based cultural production. This situation, this shift in representational power, is unlikely to change.
The commercial sector will continue to have a distinct advantage in production values and capital investment, and the audience will continue to enjoy the blockbuster movies that Hollywood and Bollywood produce. Yet when I try to talk about movies or television shows with my undergraduate students I face the effects of a highly fragmented audience. Few of them will have seen the show that I wish to discuss. If I want to talk about something from the past, for example, the excellent 1976 movie Network, staring Faye Dunaway, maybe one or two out of sixty students will have seen it. But if I ask how many of my students have seen the video parodies of Hitler in the Downfall movie, or Laughing Baby, or a cat playing piano, or David after Dentist, the majority will have seen what I saw on YouTube.
And here we come to the crux of the matter. Television no longer offers a common culture. It is losing its position as the dominant source of shared stories. Increasingly, we find ourselves sharing the experience of having seen something on YouTube. And more often than not, that something was made by amateurs like us.
Dr. Strangelove
