Topic B, Part 1: You got served.

Betagal and PF bring up an interesting point: the idea of manipulation. This isn't just restricted to wigged-out brides on YouTube (please excuse the hair-related pun); remember lonelygirl15? JT LeRoy? Most exposed pranks are justified as performance art or even social experiments, but those who were fooled tend to get really, really angry about the grift. They write books about it! They make widely ignored movies about those books!

So should staged clips be labelled as such? I'd like to think that I'm savvy enough to distinguish real footage from the scripted variety, or at least take it all with a grain of salt (if that expression applies), but what if the clip involved a crime? (Imagine, /a, if we had posted a clip of one of the fake kidnappings we pulled off in high school? Would the act be dismissed as low-brow entertainment, or would we have police knocking on our doors?)

If I saw footage of a crime on YouTube, my first instinct would be to assume that it was a prank. Who'd post that sort of thing on YouTube, of all places, right? Yet the site has been used to nab murder suspects and is being used to find missing persons. Will the proliferance of Internet hoaxes (and punking in general) diminish the effectiveness of measures like these, because the fakes create a "crying wolf" atmosphere in which the real victims are lost?

topic a, part five: surveillance camera

sorry, guys: i'm finding it hard to tackle this topic. i mean, the problems of defining public vs. private space (especially in the face of accelerating media infiltration) all by itself gives me too much to chew on. where do you even begin?!

all i can say is that the idea of every man, woman, and (shudder) child/tween/ager wielding near-microscopic cameras everywhere and then beaming the raw footage directly to every available eyeball and/or brainstem in the world feels like the future to me right now, by which i mean that it both scares and fascinates me.

what i'm really looking forward to is the explosion in editing techniques that can't be far behind. in short order, posting raw footage will have fallen hopefully behind the times, and the original blunder will pale in comparison to the seamlessly manipulated mutation it becomes....

Topic A, Part 4: Teach Your Children Well

A slight (but oh so slight as to stay on track) shift on this topic. Thanks to PF all of my friends are now addicted to RapCat, and there is indeed an indescribable beauty to being able to watch the commercial for "The Clapper" anytime you like. I mention this commercial in particular because:
a. I love the cranky old woman at the end.
b. A friend of mine tried to find this very commercial in the pre-YouTube era whilst on the job and ended up downloading a ton of spyware onto her company computer. Whoops!

But one thing that has stunned me about YouTube is the proliferation of online blogging. I'm certain there is a fancier name for these things, but you get the ideer. Now whether they are honest-to-God 16 year olds or a bunch of actors who merely look like fragile 16 year olds is really beside the point. I saw the video below and was horrified on several levels. Give it a look, I'll wait.

In my day, we wrote all of this sort of thing down in spiral bound notebooks or little journals with butterflies on the cover which were kept under lock and key. Then 2 or 3 or even 10 years later we found it again and shuddered at our innocence or stupidity or even just wept as we remembered how painful and awkward those years were. But we most certainly didn't put it on the internet to be found by our parents and classmates.

It also brings up a good point brought up earlier by Miss Imperial. Anonymity sometimes brings out the worst in people, and for evidence you need to look no farther than message boards and the comments on YouTube. This poor kid is just about as awkward as they come, and the comments under this video telling him to kill himself because he's pathetic and hated made me unbelievably sad. Is this where we are, people? Is this the magic of technology that was promised us? Laughing at Britney's bad skin on HDTV and telling the underdog to kill himself?

That's it, my kids are using a Commodore 64 for their homework and playing Pong.

Topic A, Part 3: Mostly sidebar.

Just the mention of House of Guitars -- "The store that ate my brain!" -- sends me into a tailspin of nostalgia. (I, too, grew up in suburban Ottawa; like /a, I cannot say "J&E Grocery" without adding the store's street address IMMEDIATELY AFTERWARDS, as if it were part of the name. In a way, it is.) I really did feel like I had some claim to Rochester, NY, and even though that city is right across the water from Toronto, all the American network feeds come from Buffalo affiliates. People, that is NOT the same.

Sigh.

It's true, though, that the world feels a lot smaller than it used to, thanks to the Internet...but, like /a pointed out, the world also feels a lot more congested. How do teenagers stay in the loop? It's not even a loop! It's like a bunch of loops all intertwined, then wrapped tightly around a really huge backpack. No wonder they all need three cellphones each.

(At some point we're going to have to talk about people wearing Bluetooth earpieces ALL THE TIME. I know it's been parodied on many an occasion and is therefore old news, but seriously, it's like those things are grafted to people's temples.)

And /a, you're right, there's a lot of footage on the Internet that some would call, er, "pointless". I feel as if I should applaud the DIY mentality of posting your own work on YouTube -- I suppose it beats waiting in that giant American/Canadian Idol line -- but how does one ensure that the work gets noticed?

(Oh, and I should note that the TBS feed in Toronto comes from somewhere in Georgia, which is the reason why I saw Rap Cat in the first place. Step up, Buffalo!)

Topic A, Part 2: You Filmed Me Doing What?

I grew up in suburban Ottawa, Ontario feeling that Rochester, New York – a city I haven’t visited to this day – was something of a second home, because when I was young, before the explosion of available channels, all of our American network TV stations (and by “all” I mean CBS, NBC and ABC) came from Rochester. So I knew that city, in a strange, detached way, rather intimately: The Great House of Guitars; J&E Grocery (139 Reynolds Street); The Eddie Meath Penny Fund; Carvel Ice Cream; Eastman Kodak. Rightly or wrongly, I still expect to be able to navigate my way around and to recognize local landmarks if ever I do visit The Flower City. Cultural literacy, Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe calls it.

Now, with YouTube (or Google Video, or iFilm, or Veoh, or hell, even Zip.tv), the whole damn world is something of a second home – a vast, dizzying, perplexing and altogether overwhelming one, stacked virtual floor to cyber-ceiling with all manner of cultural effluvia (satellite TV contributes to this to, in that I can now watch the evening news from St. John’s or Spokane, if I want to). And like Miss Imperial, I dig the ability to find Rap Cat, or the Geico Caveman commercials, or old music videos whenever I chose to see them. Content delivered on my terms (this is the great advantage the new providers are promising us). The problem then becomes wading your way through all the content that’s available, much of it user-generated. In theory, I’m all for user-generated content (UGC, if we must get all jargon-y). I mean, you know, power to the people and huzzah for the quasi-democratization of the media, but doesn’t the vast majority of it suck?

AFV always struck me as something to chuckle at before changing the channel (with all respect due to PF). Now there’s a gajillion pratfalls, bloopers, hi-jinks, goofs, pranks and stunts vying for your attention, so what’s any of it worth? And who has the time? I think of it all as part and parcel of the cheapening of celebrity, wherein notoriety, infamy, recognition and ridicule are basically and unfortunately synonymous.

And then, as Miss Imperial discussed, there are those unwitting victims of this extreme proliferation of lenses. Combine that with the infinite storage capability we’ve seen develop in our lifetimes, and you arrive at the very sinister notion that once something finds its way on the internet, it can never be erased, suppressed, denied, ignored, deleted or hidden. That’s a good thing in the arena of truth-finding, but not so good if you’re the victim of unwanted photojournalism or overzealous camera phone usage.

Maybe I’m just getting older, but there are days when the whole thing seems tremendously overwhelming, and I’m tempted to forget all about it and sign up for the Luddites’ newsletter (printed on paper, naturally). Of course, then somebody digs up something funny, and I’m back to toasting our cleverness and ingenuity. And being thankful that I’m not this guy:

Topic A, Part 1: Instant infamy.

"MEOW MEOW MEOWMEOW MEOWMEOWMEOW MEOW": RAP CAT

And this is what I love about YouTube: the fact that I don't have to anchor PF to the couch, hoping to god that this fast food commercial airs again, in order to share with him the magic that is Rap Cat. (Now, if only YouTube had an English version of "Die Simpsons - Rektor Skinners Lieblingsfilm", not to mention a clip of that dog howling along to a Casio keyboard on AFV, it would be perfect.)

I love that YouTube is a community-based site akin to those (ahem, illegal) file sharing servers and MP3 blogs that I believe have made the world a better place, or at least levelled the playing field. This, admittedly, is a very sunny view of things. What about the darker side of this "community"? What about the unwilling and often unknowing celebrities of the Internet?