From the “Pale Blue Dot” to the “Little Glass Dot”

YouTube has been a central topic for most, if not all of our classes, and until recently I didn’t have much experience with this new media. Dr. Strangelove suggested the video on YouTube “An anthropological introduction to YouTube” by Michael Wesch as a very good information source. I have previously seen Professor Wesch’s videos in another class, so I was curious to see this one and hopefully learn something new. It may have been the best hour I have ever spent on the Internet.

After watching the entire video, I had a completely new perspective about YouTube, but I found the more I thought about it, the more confused I became. So to organize my thoughts, I wrote a list of all the things that YouTube meant to me. Here’s what I came up with:  YouTube is…

1. A way of expression
2. A social community/network
3. A means to fame
4. Voyeurism
5. Exhibitionism
6. An escape from reality
7. An escape to reality
8. Identity
9. Entertainment
10. Self-analysis
11. Popularity
12. Cultural education
13. Form of art
14. Political debate
15. Distraction

I re-read my list and this came to mind: YouTube is everything; YouTube is life itself. I started to realize that anything that can possibly occur in someone’s life can also occur on YouTube. This includes anything from birth, to making friends, to re-birth through new identities. This website can represent anything, to anyone, at any time.

Professor Wesch adapted a poem based on Carl Sagan’s description of Earth as ”the pale blue dot”, to the video camera as “the little glass dot”. He describes how YouTube can be all the things that I mentioned, and more. In the final sentence of the poem, Wesch says, “It is not just what you make of it; it is what we make of it. It is the little glass dot; the eyes of the world.”

This is the perfect summary of how our world has changed because of the Internet, and more specifically because of YouTube. The Web has given us new levels of entertainment, easier access to information, and thousands of ways to communicate with each other.  In every corner of the world where we can access the Internet, people are connected to this global community. In a sense, because of YouTube we have become like global neighbours. It is true that the eyes of the world are always on us, but we do not know exactly who our audience, or neighbours are.

So here I feel there is a difference between the way we live online and the way we live in reality. In the real world, our life experiences are affected by those around us and those who are also included in the experience, but in the cyber world we don’t know who is around us, or who is a part of it.  So then I wonder if we can truly have the same experiences online. We may be able to live out many parts of our lives on YouTube, and to some degree there are people involved through comments and response videos, but I believe experiences in real-life have more significance.

Maria Bakardjieva, a professor at the University of Calgary explains that “virtual communities cannot be declared inferior to real-life communities simply because they lack face-to-face materiality. They cannot be celebrated as liberating or empowering by nature either, as people bring to them stocks of knowledge and systems of relevance generated throughout their unalterable personal histories and social experience. They cannot be studied and characterized exclusively by what is produced online as the cultures enacted online have their roots in forms of life existing in the ‘real’ world.”

I think that in the end our experiences in reality and our experiences online each have an effect on the other, but in today’s society central around technology, I have to wonder, which is really more important?

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Sources

Bakardjieva, M. “Virtual Togetherness: an Everyday Life Experience”

Media, Culture & Society, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 291-313, May 2003

Wesch, Michael. “An Anthropoligcal Introduction to YouTube”

http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU 

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