The Anthropology of YouTube

I personally find the examples given in this article quite uninspiring (even quaint), but the following quote from Clive Thompson’s look at the anthropology of YouTube is rather piquant:

What’s happening to video is like what happened to word processing. Back in the ’70s and early ’80s, publishing was a rarefied, expert job. Then Apple’s WYSIWYG interface made it drop-dead easy, enabling an explosion of weird new forms of micropublishing and zines. Laptop audio editing did the same thing, giving birth to the mashup and cut-and-paste subgenres of music. Then there’s photo manipulation, once a rarefied propaganda technique. Photoshop made it a folk art.

In a sense, you could argue that even after 100 years of moving pictures, we still don’t know what video is for. The sheer cost of creating it meant we used it for a stiflingly narrow set of purposes: news, documentaries, instructional presentations.

Now the lid is blowing off.

via Mind Hacks