YouTube

The Youtube video, “The Machine is Changing Us: YouTube and the Politics of Authenticity” should be retained as part of the web 2.0 reading packet proposed by Professor Bill Wolff. (Wesch, 2009) In the video presentation Wesch maps the changes in society to the development of new technologies focusing on the social media site YouTube.com.
In his presentation Wesch posed the question, is society heading towards the world of Orwell’s 1984, where people are controlled by the state and told what to do, to think and to feel, or that of Huxley’s A Brave New World, where people don’t need to be told what to do, because they just do not care about anything. They are apathetic, they have all the technology but do nothing with it but provide themselves with pleasure. By tracking small trends and larger ones, such as Mtv, Wesch does an expert job in posing the question, “Is that where we are now, have we entered the world of Huxley.” He does this by juxtaposing images and quotes from different eras to try and prove his point. One of the more humorous ones is when he shows a picture of his class, obviously bored out of their minds in a class on technological participation, then, he shows a group of kids at an American Idol audition. The kids there are on their feet, screaming, and excited. (Wesch, 2009) He then uses a quote he found to illustrate why this could be, “What we are encountering is a panicky, an almost hysterical, attempt to escape from the deadly anonymity of modern life… and the prime cause is not vanity…but the craving of people who feel their personality sinking lower into the whirl of indistinguishable atoms to be lost in a mass of civilization.” (Wesch, 2009) I believe this quote sums up the widespread use social networking sites. What makes the quote most interesting is that it was then attributed to Henry Canby who was talking about the loneliness and anonymity of living in large cites opposed to rural living. Both can be seen in parallel, a large impersonal city where individuals blend into the crowd directly relates to the large mass of information that is transmitted over the internet everyday. But how is it different? On the web people choose to be anonymous, they use anonymity to be able to say what they want. But is it used for political or social discourse? As Wesch showed more than once, instead of using social networking and Web 2.0 tools for change, they use them for making YouTube videos of their cats wearing pajamas.
YouTube has an amazing ability to bring people together as seen in the person posing as Guy Faulk and asking people to write on their hands a message they wanted to world to see. This post received over 600,000 replies with people holding up their hands promoting ideas. (Wesch, 2009) It is in this example that I believe Wesch does show that YouTube and other social networking sites can tie people together though ideas, small in this example, but as the web grows, so may the participation.