Selling Your Soul One Video at a Time

Weekends are generally spent watching TV, eating ice cream or reading a trashy romance novel.

But instead of comfort foods and mindless entertainment, I slummed my weary self up to the second floor MGC to talk to students I'd never met to talk about - go figure - mindless entertainment.

Of course, I mean YouTube. Friend of the procrastinator everywhere, home for water skiing squirrels and... an anthropological study on the newest form of communication on the web?

A study presented by John Wesch of Kansas State University at the Library of Congress argued that YouTube was a mirror for our culture and opened new lines of communication through webcams that would change the way our society related to each other.

But the students at American University disagreed, citing YouTube as entertainment that could have possible side effects of legit communication, but entertainment, none the less.

Almost all the students noted that instead of falling into the black hole of YouTube, they more often only visited the site when sent a link or when looking up a specific clip, averaging only five or ten minutes per visit.

This selective exposure to YouTube undermines what seems to be the popular cultural idea that YouTube is where college students and young professionals head when they've got nothing else to do - but that honor is really delegated to Facebook.

Out of the six students I interviewed, only one had uploaded his own content to YouTube (a video of him dancing in his dorm hall to "Since U Been Gone" by Kelly Clarkson), and all of them spoke of video blogging with the distinct tone of pity and disgust that one might use when describing road kill. Video blogs were the product of attention-seeking, fake people, and they would never be caught dead pimping themselves for their webcam.

Another perception demolished.

So even though my weekend didn't entail the customary sugar and SVU marathon, it did facilitate smashing the academic views of YouTube, bringing it down to the level of the average Joe-the-College-Student, which is pretty cool.

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