[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ&list=PL-EkEJJgT5kDF4uKhkZ09FC8KkZpqAf4Q&index=1[/youtube]
YouTube is a fragmented platform, and intentionally so, for any user-generated content platform mirrors the fragmented nature of an individual and their identity. Content on YouTube varies from the obscene to the obscure, from the “Why haven’t I seen this before” to the “Why does that exist”. And it is good that it does so, for that is why it thrives. YouTube is fundamentally a user-uploaded content-driven platform, therefore a user-driven platform, and making it a postmodern paradise of subjectively, and socially, defined, replicated, and reproduced meaning.
So also is my playlist fragmented. I do not use YouTube for any one thing in particular, but for many things in general. The freedom of the form allows for content free of most restrictions, and that is what I seek. I seek self-expression on a platform that lacks privacy and traditional means of asserting the self. I seek selves made social and bodies made communal through replication and division. I seek prose made parody and parody made prose. Sometimes I don’t seek anything at all, but rather am led through rabbit holes and (alternatively) clever advertising to what I knew I wanted or what I never knew I needed.
YouTube is (for the most part) deserving of its name, for it is a video content platform driven by you, the user. However, it is important to acknowledge the problematic parts of it. Namely the fact that YouTube is a corporation, whose incentive is profit. This incentives alters how YouTube is presented and experienced, so even though YouTube is an incredibly freeing platform, capitalism’s claws still dig into it.
In terms of specific content, I seek out and enjoy certain kinds of content.
Memes abound on YouTube, and I would be amiss if I did not mention them. I began on YouTube with memes, and I would be honored to end on the same note. The shareability and hypertextual nature of YouTube is incredibly conducive to meme culture (as indeed the internet is), and some would argue (I one among them) that every YouTube video is inherently a meme (so long as it has been experienced by more than one individual).
Video games make good videos (or rather the people that play them do), so much of my time on YouTube is spent searching for pleasurable people to watch playthrough games, as well as hunting for trailers of games, interviews with developers, explorations into games and the limits of them. Like I enjoy watching a friend play a game, I enjoy watching people on YouTube play a game that I love and seeing their reaction to it, or searching for other people’s views on a game so I can sharpen my own.
Animation abounds on YouTube, and it wonderful that it does so. I have been in turns inspired and awed by the creations of others, which spurs me on to my own creations. Art videos and videos about art have a similar effect on me. The isolation of the observer of a YouTube video (or the collective watching of a video, depending upon the context) creates an interesting space for art to work in and around.
YouTube, like Google the term and the company, has become an ingrained aspect of the modern internet for many people, myself included, and it is one that is here to stay for the foreseeable future (not that any of the future is foreseeable).