Certification - July 2008 - (Page 24)

IT CULTURE Analyzing the Societal Effects of YouTube DANIEL MARGOLIS The domain name YouTube first was activated in February 2005. By February 2008, the site was grabbing one-third of the estimated 10 billion views of online videos that month, up from 15 percent in 2007, according to Internet marketing research company comScore. Ten billion views a month is a number that speaks for itself: Online video is an explosive new medium, and YouTube has proven to be dominant in this arena. And while for some the site provides mere entertainment, for others, YouTube is proving to be a valuable research tool, as well as a medium for expression or documentation of aberrant behavior. The challenge in analyzing YouTube as a medium is that its meteoric rise makes it difficult to get a handle on its place in society. “Even though it’s an unavoidable force, the truth is we don’t yet know what kind of unavoidable force it is,” said Andrew Perrin, associate professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “I like to think about new media that arrive on the scene in a number of dimensions, and one of them is the interactivity of it — the extent to which a viewer or consumer is able to direct the content,” he said. “As a medium, YouTube has a certain pack mentality to it because there are only so many decision rules you can use to find stuff to watch on YouTube, and so whatever someone else has watched turns out to be what you’re likely to watch.” In many cases, people use YouTube casually: Someone e-mails or somehow exposes them to a link to a video clip and so they watch it. And in many cases this will be content that originated elsewhere. “It’s a pretty derivative medium. What people mostly are watching is video that we know of through some other source, and they use YouTube for its capacity to serve that video, more than to be a medium of its own,” Perrin said. For this reason, Steve Jones, professor in the Department of Communication and associate dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, feels it’s too soon to know what place YouTube holds in our society. “It’s certainly not replacing TV. At this point, it’s sitting alongside other video media,” Jones said. “It’s probably safe to say that, over time, as this generation of high school and college students gets older, they will be quite open to getting what we would consider television content via YouTube, and they would probably be comfortable getting other kinds of content via YouTube. So in that respect, I think YouTube has begun the process of moving video to IP-based distribution, independent of traditional or cable networks.” Going beyond this migration, however, what YouTube does that video media before it have not done is provide ordinary users a way to expose their content to millions of eyeballs immediately. In the past, people without access to a television network may have been able to record video content and distribute it via tape or DVD, or with some effort get themselves cable access. But these methods lack the widespread, immediate accessibility of YouTube and other online video sites. 24 CERTIFICATION MAGAZINE July 2008 http://www.uic.edu http://www.uic.edu http://www.youtube.com http://www.unc.edu/ http://www.unc.edu/

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Certification - July 2008

Certification - July 2008 Editor's Letter Contents Data System Virtual Village Tech Careers Dear Techie Academic Connection Look Ahead Troubleshooting Testing Your Foot in the Door: Certification at the Entry Level Analyzing the Societal Effects of YouTube Interface Spread the Knowledge: Becoming an IT Trainer Inside Certification Ad Index What We Like Endtag

Certification - July 2008

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