You, Me, YouTube, and Media
0:00 All right, so here we are, one of the elephants. Um, cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long, um, bumps. And that's, that's cool. [Music] And that's pretty much all there is to say.
Since the founder of YouTube, Jawed Karine, posted this video over 10 years ago in 2005, over 1.3 billion videos have since been posted to his website at about 300 hours per minute every single day of the week. In that time, 34.7 billion video clicks will have been registered by a total of 900 million people.
Most of these videos won't be seen by anyone. A lot of them will be forgotten archives of times once passed, buried beneath experiences themselves buried under more experiences. Some may be friends screwing around, enjoying a night on the town. Maybe there's someone uploading speed paints or reviews, or even a Gangnam Style video, because people actually still make them, believe it or not. But whatever the case, there's always someone in these videos, or at
1:01 least someone took the time to film and upload it this idea gives a sort of personal element to them when that's even found in the most viewed videos like challenges Let's Plays or Drama videos it's always there I often hear it said that all this makes YouTube a sort of alternative Media or perhaps a source of alter alternative journalism but saying this tends to present YouTube as just another form of established media and really that's not the case when you think of media you tend to think of a lot of high budget high production value material Game of Thrones the highest rated show of 2016 for instance costs about 10 million dollars to make per episode that is it cost a total of 100 million dollars to make per season with some cast members making up to a half a million dollars per episode but this isn't the case when it comes to YouTube most YouTubers say for the BART Bakers and the Freddie Wongs of the website don't have any budget to make their content even people like Casey neistat or Vsauce or even PewDiePie certainly aren't putting in 10 million dollars per video so why are people watching YouTube so avidly why are 4 million videos a day being watched when people could easily watch content that's probably a hundred
2:01 times the production quality for arguably the same price? To answer these questions, you need to go back to over a decade ago when people were still discussing the potential issues with the prospects of reality television, and when people were questioning as to why anyone would watch it. Why watch people doing nothing, show produced for next to nothing, as opposed to something like The Wire, another popular show of the day?
Then and now, the answer lies in the psychology of why people take part in the viewing of any sort of media. There's an element of fantasy that goes into each of them, a sort of seeing of ourselves in the material that we are consuming. Reality TV brought that boundary closer to the prospective viewer, giving them a sort of immediate potential to find themselves in the position of attentive power that reality TV imparts. There doesn't need to be script writing, focus group, cinematography, plot, or anything, really. All there really needs to be is a person, or usually a group of people, and to the average mind, that person might as well be anyone.
Fast forward nearly two decades, and what happens when it comes to YouTube is that the breaking down of boundaries between media and the consumer is further distilled to the
3:03 point where the two often become one in the same. But it's really not something that's unique to YouTube, though. If you think about the real beginnings of the internet, you'd probably find yourself back at Newgrounds, and you'd find a lot of things identical to what you have on YouTube, and retaining material produced by people like the average consumer, there's a means for the consumer to become the entertainer and vice versa. But even then and there, there remains a skill set for many that continues to act as a barrier to achieving the fantasy that they see.
YouTube refines this even further, because you don't even need skill to be a YouTuber. You no longer need to put in a few hours for 20 seconds of an animation, as you would have had to on Newgrounds, nor do you need to learn complex videographic or editing skills. All you need is your iPhone and a mildly interesting life, and you have the outright potential to be as big as almost anyone on the website. You automatically become the writer, director, and creator, because the plot, story, and entire focus of every episode of your show—that is, every video posted to your channel—is you.
But, of course, that's not to say that you have the ability to just sit in front of the camera and waste the
4:05 time of the audience. You have to do something with that potential that you're given. It's because of this fact that YouTube experiences a similar degree of diversity in relation to average television. But despite this, content that takes real, relatively speaking, a lower degree of effort remains popular. The reason being, vlogs are the epitome of individuality. They are the simplest video that one can make, and as such, they reinforce the personalist nature of the website.
From here, vloggers will generally go in one of two directions. If you're a YouTuber more like Casey Neistat or Sam Colder, you'll continue to push these videos to points of extremely high quality. You'll incorporate cinematography, taking the time to set up shots and walk into them, maybe leave the camera sitting for an hour or two just for a good time lapse. You'll use a lot of wide-angle lenses to bring yourself closer to the audience by means a simulating actual eyesight. Maybe you'll use montage to emphasize a continued progression of events, kind of like you're living in a movie. You might make these edits flow with such precision and interconnectivity then it makes your life appear as if a non-stop series of adventures and goings-on
5:05 reinforced by color contrast that pit cyan against orange to make it appear as if everything is coming alive. Overall, you will most likely link all of this up to incredibly emotional music, while they're uplifting or more reserved, bringing everything together to make the audience want to live your life, because again, the focus is on you as an individual.
But conversely, on the other side of the coin lie minimalist vloggers like Guava Juice, Wolfie Raps, or Comedy Shorts Gamer. Instead of breaking down the rhetorical triangle with quality, people like this utilize a sort of abject realism to connect with their audiences. Guava Juice, for instance, may sit in a tub of mashed potatoes or maybe make a Lego gummy burger, whatever the [ __ ] that means, but either way, to the audience, the reaction to these actions is real. There's a sense that they too can perform what they are seeing. Improvisation and generally lower quality video both work to emphasize the end of not "If this were me," but "Why isn't this already me?"
Bobby Burns, in his video dissecting Filthy Frank, noted how this use of realism is not, however, limited to
6:07 vloggers but what he fails to touch on is that the focus of the show remains to be frank the individual every episode of the show is Frank in a new situation it's what is Frank doing what is he saying what is he feeling who is he with why is he feeling this way and why should we care the realism only works to underscore that the focus of the show itself remains to be frank and remind us of the capacity to see ourselves in his place that those little mistakes are poorly done effects are there only reinforces that individual Focus if you think about commentary or video essay channels you find much of the same the focus remains on a single individual and what they're doing thinking and why they're thinking it you ultimately want to see them as people like yourself so it would only make sense to film a new room at it minimally use perhaps consumer quality microphones or maybe even not show your face at all because again these are things that anyone can truly do and when YouTubers incorporate things like subscriptions or comments or begging for likes you're reminded further that you can be a part of the
7:09 video focus. You're reminded that every single facet of the website itself is built to transform that fantasy of you becoming the star, the reality of you already being the star. This is how YouTube competes with real world television, whether by means of high quality, well-made videos documenting lives, by simple, mean jokes, or by a system that mitigates creator and consumer interaction. The personal individuality of the website goes beyond what television can achieve, and in doing so, the speaker, subject, and audience become one and the same.
This is Mr. Amazing. Thanks for watching. [Music] [Music]
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