Hilarious Twitter Video

Having not jumped on the Twitter train (try saying that 5 times fast!), I sometimes feel like I'm missing out on something really important and special.

Then I find a video like this...

YouTube, ITube, WeAllTube: Response to An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube

Whenever I tell people I’m in MIT (Media, Information, and Technoculture), they always ask, “What do you do? Watch movies in class?” And when I say, “yeah, sometimes,” they give me this disappoint head shake, as if that’s nothing. As if what we’re doing doesn’t matter, or is so easy and fun that it’s completely pointless.

This is not the case. At all.

As Marshall McLuhan said (and I think this quote might actually be the MIT catchphrase), “The medium is the message.” The reason we watch movies, TV shows, news broadcasts, and YouTube in class, is because everyone does it. Because media affects us and plays such a major part of everyday life, us MIT-ers are just trying to find out the why and how.

In the YouTube video, “An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube,” there was one line in particular that caught my attention: “When media change, human relationships change.” So why shouldn’t it be studied?

Without TV, the internet, and cell phones, we probably wouldn’t be alone as much. We might not even feel the need to be as self-expressive, to set ourselves aside form the anonymous mass. Being separated/fragmented individuals, it’s obvious we want a solid community. It just so happens that YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and the blogosphere is it.



People were offended and hurt when lonelygirl15, for example, was revealed to be fake, resulting in a YouTube “authenticity crisis.” You wouldn’t want your friends or family to lie to you, so why is it any different when your online friends (people you trust and talk to and listen to) aren’t who you thought they were? It brings the loneliness back, and people don’t like that feeling. No one likes to be played like that.

Sometimes...no, every time I YouTube I find the rudest comments (and some I can’t even read because apparently spelling and grammar are a thing of the past). I almost want to tell them to shut the F up if they’re going to be so negative, but then it really wouldn’t be YouTube.

The anonymity of the “invisible audience” is what makes YouTube a place for and of authenticity; if everyone knew it was really YOU speaking, you might not say what you really think. You might not even bother to say anything.

Newspapers, the telephone, the radio, the television, and the Internet have all changed the way we work, interact, think, and basically live. But there’s one scenario that can change everything, and I mean, everything: a power outage.

Imagine you couldn’t watch TV, check your email, drive, buy groceries, check your email again, text your BFF, cook. Our world as we know it would fall in on itself; without our technology and our media, we’d be completely lost and probably very lonely.

Then again, it might mean we’d start connecting more physically, say, having a conversation with someone while in the same room. Not that we don’t do that now, but now we have a choice not to.

See? There's more to MIT than just “watching movies.”

Now watch this movie.

Obama to the Rescue!

Woohoo, it’s official! Barack Obama is the new President of the US of A.

This was the first time I watched any presidential inauguration, and the first time I ever made a point to. But since I had no other comparison for “how things went” on inauguration days in the past, I decided to look them up on YouTube.

Oddly enough (insert sarcasm here) the first videos that popped up were protests against the previous President’s victory. Beneath them were comments from Bush supporters, who all seemed to share the view that the protesters were, basically, scumbags. One user even thought it was “ironic” that people would protest someone who’s responsible for upholding their right to protest.

Okay, if you can’t demonstrate your beliefs through protest, why would someone think they have the right to express theirs through any other means? (Like on YouTube, for example.)

But it’s not really that shocking, is it? That a self-professed Bush-fan would argue against the right to protest – or in other words, that whole First Amendment/Freedom of Speech-thing that serves as the foundation for a healthy democracy.

While “Democracy” has yet to be completely realized in the United States or elsewhere, seeing Obama’s inauguration I’m glad many of our southern neighbours had someone to vote for, rather than against; someone whose message they can actually care about and believe in; someone who’s “of the people, by the people, for the people,” as one of The Greats put it.

I guess only time will tell if he is.


(Image: iphonesavior.com)