One of things that I’ve seen Da F00t do over and over again during his YouTube career is to paint himself as a champion of “the little guy” on YouTube. Whether or not this is a genuine position of his is not my problem, but the flawed view he has of the current state of YouTube in particular and social media in general is something I have a few thoughts about. In his latest video/blog post combo, he bemoans the state of YouTube as a platform for free expression.* From his blog post:
This time a decade ago, no one had even heard of youtube, nor did the bandwidth really exist for the project. The emergence of Youtube was unforeseen by, well lets be real, everyone. Microsoft was left standing, as was Google. The access of users to cheap video editing equipment, and further simultaneously given access to the vast array of various uploaded media clips led to an explosion of creativity.
However as time progressed, expectedly those who did well acquired a disproportionate amount of the traffic. Now, I don’t have the figures, but a comparative handful of users provide the significant lions share of the traffic. This has had two detrimental effects on youtube.
He then bemoans the fact that (essentially) YouTube is a maturing content platform (or mature) which has little or no protection for new providers – even though new providers can and do manage to succeed, it’s just as rare as it ever was.
Seriously, the problem with Da F00t’s analysis (in case you missed it in my snarky summary above) is that he is overlooking the fact that mainstream media have as one of their major goals sucking the life out of counterculture or fringe social movements, then bottling and selling it for a profit.
Neither YouTube nor blogs (especially blogs) are sitting anywhere but directly in the American cultural mainstream. They may not be that common in everyone’s everyday life, but they are no longer strange. Don’t believe me? Daniel Tosh now has a show on G4 called Tosh.0 that’s almost entirely about YouTube videos. Corporate CEOs are encouraged to blog or tweet (or at least pretend they do while having someone else actually do it). These things are now part of everyday business.
Pretending they aren’t, or that they will do anything at all to be edgy in any way is sheer folly. If you want to protect new growth, go where new growth is possible, rather than trying to create nursery conditions in a place that will do its best to destroy them.
* Regarding the combination of video on YouTube/blog post on Blogspot, I suspect he uses the dual medium to direct traffic to his blog. YouTube is such a low-bandwidth method of getting out information I can see why it might be helpful, but it would lend more credibility to him using it for this reason if the blog post and the video weren’t almost equally perfunctory.
