I'm very behind in the game here having only today become enamored of YouTube. How did this happen? YouTube hadn't even registered on my radar until about ten days ago. I think I saw lonelygirl15 mentioned in
Rolling Stone, then came Google's acquisition and all of the subsequent hoopla. Of course, the YouTube phenomenon has been under way here for... well quite honestly I don't know exactly how long, but certainly the better part of the past year. YouTube, dare I say, is the new Blogger. But I'm just figuring that out.
I peeped YouTube for the first time one day last week, real quickly in the midst of a flurry of work I was doing. I didn't really delve into it at all - just a quick glimpse. But after reading a story in my still beloved
New Yorker just last night (a story which, by the way, went to press prior to the Google announcement) and then clicking on to the SF Gate Web site this morning and finding a story mourning the imminent transformation of YouTube post-Google buyout - which was accompanied by a link to a video of a snoozing cat - I took the plunge... clicked on the link, watched the video, and went wandering around YouTube.
I didn't wander very long, however, before I started doing searches for specific content, and after watching some random stuff like the kid's drum solo and some Jimi Hendrix & Red Hot Chili Peppers clips (okay, and a little JD Fortune), I remembered a YouTube user mentioned in the
NY'er article - geriatric1927. Now regular YouTubers will know about this gentleman already, and if you're reading this and don't know about him, you should. And you may well soon whether you seek him out or not, since he is officially, and far and away, the leading attraction on YouTube and therefore the involuntary subject of a great deal of media attention (witness my encounter with him in the
NY'er.)I spent a good part of the day today in the virtual company of geriatric1927 and later in the day I felt like a much calmer and more civilized person for having done so. He is at once an anachronism and a revelation - at once the absolute antithesis to everything the Internet represents (and to much of the content on YouTube) and the embodiment of the very best of our humanity that it has to offer... and for precisely that reason he is the biggest breath of fresh air I have encountered online in my many years of peripatetic surfing.
I should mention that as I spent much of my work day with his videos playing on one of my two computer screens, at times only listening to his voice, I couldn't help thinking he would do wonderfully well with the Podcast format as well. It was partly the sensation I had of listening to some terrific programming on BBC radio that led to my subsequent sensation of enhanced civility. Seeing and hearing geriatric1927 tell his life story - or talk about any subject, for that matter - has the effect of restoring realism to the frenetic world we live in today, a world whose freneticism is due in no small part to the mad genius of the World Wide Web. And the fact that Peter has been able to reach out through this medium and have the whole world reach back to him is the original IDEA(L) behind the Web: the facilitation of global community building.
[Note: Yes, this applies only to those of us who have computer access. That is another conversation that I don't feel like having right now.]
Which leads me to my other YouTube fave, renetto, who is over the moon for YouTube for precisely that reason: how effective a tool it is for true networking. Renetto is, in my opinion, a wonderful complement to geriatric1927... going back and forth between the two of them made me feel like if they were all YouTube had to offer, I would be satisfied. It's a sort of gospel according to Peter and Paul, and it's poetic.
I imagine I will write more here about these two in the future. But for now I'll just say that several posts ago I stated that the revolution is being broadcast via your computer, and now that I've made my way to YouTube I realize that that statement is more true than I realized.
The question is, what will Google's acquisition (as someone dubbed it, "GooTube") ultimately mean for YouTube?
