When I first moved on to campus at UMass, I found that everyone else seemed to converse with the assumption that everyone understood certain references to the internet.  I had never heard of almost anything they mentioned.  I did not know why it was so important that everything be over nine thousand as opposed to simply ten thousand.  I had no idea why it made someone the most interesting man in the world just to drink a certain beer.  I wrote to my best friend from high school, begging her to educate me in the ways of the internet.  She replied with a crash course in the memes of the time, including a ten minute long YouTube edit of two pokemon repeatedly saying the word “mudkip.”  In an undeniable sign that I was new to this game, I thought I was supposed to watch all ten minutes, which I in fact did.

Searching for what I actually wanted to watch, rather than something I was told I needed to watch to understand pop culture, led to videos with more than one word in their dialogue.  Eventually I started finding media formerly only available as dispensed from the company that owned it, which often meant that it was not available at all.

For example, though Disney owns the Muppets and therefore the entire archives of the Muppet Show, they have stubbornly refused to release the fourth and fifth (perhaps the best) seasons of the Muppet Show on disc, nor do they currently broadcast them.  This means that they are not in any way profiting from their ownership of the Muppet Show, and presumably that there is no way to properly sate a Muppet addiction.  Muppet lovers found this to be an unacceptable condition, and turned to YouTube to rectify it.  Despite the fact that they have no source of income coming from these particular episodes, as they will not release them legally, Disney frequently demands that particular clips be taken down from the internet on principle of the matter—but fights ineffectively, choosing one segment at a time (episodes are almost always posted in multiple parts).  The communalism and common goals of people who wish to watch the Muppets make this a ridiculously losing battle for Disney—there are three different accounts run by separate people, all of which upload the same clips, so if any segment of an episode is ever missing from one account, it will be accessible from either of the other two until the user attacked by Disney can re-upload.

Yet as much as Disney and other copyright-holding corporations fight the promulgation of their work on free sites, it functions as advertisement for the things that can be legally purchased.  The ability to stream classic (superior) Muppet sketches increases interest in the mew Muppet movies of two years ago and next month.  Similarly the multitudes of people scrambling for any clip of the new movie Frozen that there is to be had are only increasing their appetite for when the full movie can be bought.  There has even been a resurgence of those unfortunate videos repeating a single word or phrase over and over again, though now it’s Kermit’s flailing “YAAAAY!!” or Princess Anna speaking the word “balls.”