"Now with the advent of the internet we have the first medium that is oral and written, private and public, individual and collective at the same time." Derek de Kerckhove - from The Skin of Culture, 1995.
And, as Tom Scocca describes in The YouTube Devolution from The New York Observer, we have a medium that preserves and shares moving visuals, clips from TV, movies, and home videos that are searchable and replayable in a way we humans have never seen before. For a world-wide audience too, as I described here. YouTube allows us to find and watch as many times as we want videos - in a manner similar to how we can find text(s) in libraries or through Web search engines.
Scocca says:
Memory has always been a shaky witness. But writing was checkable, to one degree or another. There could be differences of taste or opinion, but there was the text lurking, waiting to settle the question. If you told someone else a piece of writing was good (or gorgeous, or moving, or persuasive), that claim would have to survive the other person’s reading of it.
And ...
The Internet left writers more exposed than ever. If you were published from the mid-90’s onward, you ended up in a text-based panopticon: At any time, someone, somewhere, could conceivably be reading something you had written.
(I love the word "panopticon" - it is so brutal, and so descriptive of what the Web is.)
Writing text led to the development of indices and, consequently, to libraries, and the Web is not the enemy of libraries but part of their natural evolution.
These opportunities represent, in part, a surprise victory for library science. As we plunged into the digital age, one of the great fears was of format obsolescence: People would throw out old-fashioned paper in favor of electronic archives, only to suddenly find that they had all the works of human knowledge stored on five-and-a-quarter-inch floppies and nobody was making floppy drives anymore. But with Web video, people are raiding their personal, inaccessible stashes of VHS tapes, winding through them till they find the important bits, and transferring them from a near-obsolete medium to a current one.
YouTube is a bold new step into the culture we humans are creating with our media -
YouTube stands as the opposite of old television because, above all, it’s easy. It doesn’t demand that you install a player; it doesn’t crash your browser. It embeds in blogs and plays there, freely.
YouTube and similar sites are taking us into a new semiosis, away from text which demands analysis and a distancing objectivity, the stalwart standards of our academic culture, into the sensational media that provides the experience without demanding the analysis.
I recommend Scocca's article - The YouTube Devolution.
technorati tags:Scocca, YouTube, semiosis
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