Only five years after YouTube launched in 2005, Chris Anderson of TED gave a remarkably insightful talk not coincidentally on — and about — his online platform. He pointed first to the primacy of print for more than 500 years: to get words, still pictures, and ideas to mass audiences, face-to-face communication simply could not match the scale of print. In a blink of historical time, however, that primacy was dislodged by online video. As a medium, it conveys vocal inflection, body languages, and facial features: the cues humans spent millennia learning to discern. Even more importantly, online video conveys these nuances at often zero cost to massive audiences, nearly instantaneously but asynchronously. As of 2017, a billion hours of YouTube video were viewed every day and as of 2020, 2 billion people will be logging in at least once a month.
In contrast to print media, which is characterized by high costs and thus gatekeepers who ration scarce production and distribution capacity, online video is a big tent. The volume of contributed video that is available is simply staggering, unfathomable (not to mention uncatalogable) at human scale. This unprecedented access increases diversity of viewpoints but raises powerful questions about truth, fact, and accuracy. The lack of any cataloging system and only minimal content standards allows almost anything short of pornography and extreme violence to be allowed in. Furthermore, even though YouTube creates very little video (though this is changing), the curation process is extremely important. Since moving to new recommender systems in 2018, the YouTube algorithms that successfully keep viewers watching inexorably steer them toward videos with higher “engagement,” usually in the form of more extreme positions. The most benign query can lead to pseudoscience or worse in only six to eight auto-plays. (Zeynep Tufekci at UNC has done important work on YouTube and radicalization.) As we will see, every benefit brought by online video implies troubling downsides as well.
YouTube, Vimeo, and their kin act as a repository for everything from political speeches to standup comedians, serving as a sort of attic for many cultural artifacts, both widely popular and deeply personal to an individual or small group. As of 2018 YouTube alone streamed more songs than Amazon, Spotify, and Apply combined (while paying by far the lowest royalty rates: 48% of streams delivered but only 7% of artist revenue). For every Justin Bieber, there are many thousands of amateurs: one finds both Hollywood hits and anonymous piano practices. Self-made stars have emerged in areas from high school sports to fashion to online gaming to commentary at the same time that millions of videos get views in the single digits.
Finally, online video is a terrific teacher, whether of piano, home appliance repair, makeup technique, or new languages. Former music professor Rick Beato has a series of videos explaining instrumental technique, composition, and dissections of “what makes this song great.” It’s hard to imagine a million people signing up to learn music theory in the physical world, but Beato is so good at his craft that he’s got a huge following. Haas machine tools does a "video tip of the day" that's incredibly engaging even if you've never come within 100 feet of a CNC machine. Along with the company's other quality content, I've never seen better corporate use of online video.
In contrast to television and movies, the cultural ethos of online video is markedly more diverse. Wikipedia’s list of the 17 historically most viewed YouTube videos includes Brazilian soccer legend Ronaldinho, U.S. based amateur dancer Judson Laipply, the finger-biting English baby Charlie, and as I write, Luis Fonsi, a Puerto Rican singer singing in Spanish. The longest-tenured artist on the list is the Korean singer-songwriter-record producer-rapper Psy: “Gangnam Style” was the most-watched YouTube video in history for 1689 days -- more than 4 ½ years. Such cultural reach and range bring a multitude of opportunities and side effects.
Here’s one example. Content owners have a variety of available responses when Google finds videos that might include copyrighted material. One individual was accused of using the takedown process maliciously: he set YouTubers up with two notices, in preparation for a “three strikes and you’re banned” expulsion from what is for many a very profitable platform. Sometimes he asked for money to refrain from [fraudulently] shutting down the people's channels. In one case, said individual used the takedown process to obtain a real-world physical address — to which he sent police in a “swatting” raid. The entire DMCA apparatus was not designed for a planet-scale online video platform, but this is only one example of the many unintended consequences of YouTube and related services.
In line with this set of cultural functions, we have to find ways to think about online video as a medium, one bringing massive value but also putting new demands on regulators, viewers, uploaders, algorithm designers, advertisers, content owners, and others in the vast ecosystem. To take but one example, online video is a different kind of text compared to either print or broadcast TV, and new forms of literacy and illiteracy are emerging. Unlike television, where a linear schedule was the organizing principle (until the dawn of the streaming era), asynchronous online video is governed by search and recommendation, both human and algorithmic. This difference in wayfinding has many implications for what is made, seen, propagated, and imitated.
To conclude, the story of Kenya’s Julius Yego is both heartwarming and instructive. His country boasts a rich tradition of distance running but has had little success in field events such as the high jump or shot put. In 2009 Yego was frustrated by his progress with the javelin, so he spent time in the cybercafe watching every javelin-related video he could find, with particular attention to training programs. In 2011 he became the first Kenyan to win a title in a field event at the All Africa games; by 2015 he was world champion. Yego then earned a silver medal at the 2016 Olympics despite suffering an ankle injury. There is no way an athlete from a developing economy could master a technique-intensive event looking at books: Yego’s medals show we are living in the presence of not only a new medium, but a new distribution system, a new curation method, and a new scale of knowledge exchange.
Online video has the potential to redefine human institutions from sewing to citizenship to psychotherapy. One of the challenges is finding ways to study such a vast, dynamic, culturally significant, and heterogeneous platform. DM me if you have ideas.
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