February 5, 2007

The Clean and Strange YouTube Adventure

Did you know that there is a web site where you can see a robot doing stunts on a skateboard or Chad Vader (apparently Darth’s nephew) using the dark side of The Force in his job as day manager of a grocery store?

There is – it’s called YouTube.

On YouTube you can watch a girl getting shot across her back yard on a giant slingshot. You can watch $60,000 worth of iPods falling over like dominos and finishing by knocking an iBook off a pedestal. You can watch a seventh grade boy gripe about his science teacher and make faces about his lab partner.

You can watch a guy who owns a guitar and whose mom cuts his hair, sitting on his bed playing the two chords he knows and singing a really, really long original (mostly) song. You can watch an undiscovered Fellini or Bergman unfold his artistic genius in footage of a guy, whose mom cuts his hair, driving around a suburban neighborhood (in his mom’s Volvo).

You can watch a dark, grainy, out-of-focus video of a high school girl in her bedroom, wearing a pair of boxer shorts and a tank top, and dancing to Gwen Stefani. Some 754,839 people had already enjoyed the one that I ran across.

You know, I find it a little bit surprising that a 20-something man could believe that other people might want to watch him in a five-minute film sitting at a messy table in a wife-beater and needing a shave, humming a White Stripes song and eating a bowl of corn flakes. It is even more surprising to me that he is right - YouTube is one of the most active web sites on the Internet.

Now I don’t think this is entirely new behavior for our species. After all, one of the first things anybody does when they get their first camera is take a picture of themselves in a mirror, achieving deep philosophical insights that rank right up there with the realization that “dog” is “god” spelled backward. In the past, though, very few people felt the need to send those mirror pictures to the New York Times.

Then came the Communication Age and mass e-mail and blogs, and suddenly our innermost thoughts could go out to the world in an instant, not wasting any time rattling around in our brains to sort out whether or not they made any sense. And now, with YouTube, we can at last document for posterity the sights and sounds and raw emotions involved in opening and using a brand-new bottle of drain cleaner.

The really amazing thing is that YouTube is almost irresistible, kind of like watching a train wreck or a George W. Bush speech. You can find yourself strangely fascinated when people you’ve never met share, in authentic shaky-cam, their experience pulling down a dead maple tree with a pickup truck. Or when three completely self-absorbed young girls take you on a video tour of a McDonald’s ladies room.

Contrary to what you might have heard, the stuff on YouTube may be outrageously strange, and sometimes a little suggestive, but there isn’t any really naughty stuff there. At least, I couldn’t find any.

No matter how hard I tried.

Copyright © 2007, Michael Ball

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