When I first heard that we would be required to curate a playlist of YouTube videos that we felt best represented our relationship with the prolific website, I was excited. Also a little relieved, as students often are encountering an assignment that sounds easy, painless and fun. “Fifteen videos!” I said to myself, “That’s nothing. That’ll be a breeze.” Unsurprisingly I had a fair bit of trouble finding fifteen videos that: a.) I felt so strongly about that I thought they ‘represented’ me and my constantly evolving relationship with the popular video service and b.) didn’t horrendously embarrass me. I’m still not sure I succeeded with the latter.

More than any other website, YouTube lives up the pop-culture hype of the internet changing our relationship to information. While the internet has provided unprecedented redistribution of who has access to information in the form of news, articles and other forms of media, it simply cannot be denied that, on the internet, the video is king. If we measured the ‘viral’ success of the most shared and read article of 2013, it wouldn’t hold a candle to whatever Beyonce video was the most watched of the first month of 2014. The sheer magnitude of that sort of reach is staggering and has become so ubiquitous that YouTube has become a fixture in our culture that I think goes beyond gimmicky “Word of the Year” awards. YouTube appears on our prime time new media outlets. Our president shares State of the Union addresses through YouTube.

What does that mean for me, as an individual user of the internet? Well, I often find myself commenting, with surprise, that YouTube was only founded in 2006. It has changed my relationship with media, the casual approach I have to gaining access to almost any visual piece of media, so drastically that it’s hard to imagine it didn’t exist a mere 8 (!! I’m getting old though) years ago. I use YouTube pretty much every day at least once. Usually I’m watching something silly or funny that happened recently. But often I’m looking for pretty specific intellectually engaging material. The miracle of YouTube is not just that you can find things that people put on the internet, but that video from before either of my parents were born exists on there as well. If a researcher from the 1950’s was brought to our time and shown YouTube, they shit bricks. Maybe literally. (James Baldwin’s famous debate and Toni Morrison’s talk are two examples of this.)

YouTube has also supplied a platform for entertainment that would never be allowed to flourish in more tightly controlled outlets like cable television. It’s naive of course to pretend that the same power structures that restrict media in ‘old media’ is completely absent in newer platforms like YouTube, but there’s a simpler logic at play here. If you can find your audience, your videos will flourish. And many, many small producers of video material that might be considered less safe for conventional distributors have found their audience.

Also, I’m not gonna lie and say that I don’t sometimes look at videos of really good twerking videos or guys kissing when I need some feelings in my life.

-Hasani