Youtube Nation: Democractically Elected Garbage
Youtube is the mitotic spawn of Paypal, one Internet giant crawling forth from the loins of another. It has been stomping around these godless fields since 2005 and I have indulged its services many times for such diverse purposes as finding music videos that have long been out of regular circulation to grabbing fragmented fan-dubs in an ill-advised academic pursuit of anime. Yet in all those years I never actually spent more than a few seconds on the front page of Youtube. I had no reason to watch a questionably legal copy of the latest Beyonce video and I sure as hell wasn't going to watch some teenage vlogger rant about all the "random" stuff that pops into his or her head. But then I realized that I have this column and I can't really talk about Youtube without exploring those items it wears on its face like some kind ever-changing tribal tattoo.
The video at the top of this article is, as of this moment, the most viewed Youtube video of the day. With 652,315 views and counting "HARDCORE BLOODY FIGHTS" is king of the ever-shifting hill of refuse that is Youtube. While I'm not totally plugged into the whole... damn it. I actually have to write the word "vlogosphere". Anyway, I don't usually follow the million-viewer vlogs that have come to dominate Youtube, but I'm savvy enough to know that the people starring in the above video are popular vloggers.
I've developed something of a fascination with the super-vloggers. They epitomize the big fish in the little pond, only the pond isn't so little. When it comes to Youtube, it's more like a partially proficient fish in an ocean of fish that suck at being fish. Hold on, I just wrote the word "fish" too many times and now it's lost all meaning.
Fish.
There. Anyway, what really astounds me about the super-vloggers is that they're still not very good at what they do, they're just better at it than everybody else on Youtube. Their jokes aren't funny, they're just not not funny. Their production flourishes aren't impressive, but they still are rough facsimiles of what they're supposed to be. Youtube has given a home to the third-string entertainers of the world, those people who will never get to be in movies or on TV and who will also never make a career of admittedly lower-quality live, local performances. It's like public access television with an audience several times larger than network TV.
The tiny, little sliver of optimism in my bitter soul wants to believe that these earliest moments of million-hit vlogging are just the rough, pioneering days of something better, sort of like how movies pretty much sucked until Murnau and Lang did something new with the medium. I want to see what vlogging will look like in five or ten years, whether or not it'll continue to be a bastion of quasi-suck. For now, I'll just have to settle for the likes of Phil DeFranco and kevjumba (and kevjumba's dad).
