by Mark Greif
There are many great clips on YouTube, but this is the greatest because it perfects the fusion of the two major reference points of YouTube video as it exists right now (perhaps everything will be different in a year): the talent show—the performance and display of individual talents of the most traditional kind—and bits of television pulled from elsewhere, especially that bastard form the music video, the three-minute montage set to a song, which even MTV abandoned in the 1990s. That’s not to say that these two things, amateur talents and stolen professional TV, are all there is on YouTube; you could never say “all there is on YouTube,” because there is always more. Someone will always be there to say to you the words “dogs pooping,” and indeed on plugging that phrase into the search box there will be footage of dogs pooping: on ice, on the sidewalk, in the park. Yet the things one comes to “naturally” on YouTube, by clicking through, are heavily weighted to the following options: dancing, singing, and instrumentals (expert and inexpert), skateboarding, bike tricks, car and motorcycle accidents (caught on tape by traffic cameras), momentary America’s Funniest Home Videos miscues and bloopers, and, finally, short bits of talking to the camera.
The strangest and most effective genre of clips—the form of video satisfying to the maximum number of people for the minimum amount of effort—may be simply this: footage of absolutely anything whatsoever, silenced and set to a sound track. For example, a car show: engine after chrome engine of open-hooded Mustangs, set to heavy metal. With a tremendous power of darkness, the music sets the mood of these V8s, so you can ignore the daytime—the happy people sitting on lawn chairs at the side, the beach balls, the barbecuing—and fully take in the automotive rock ’n’ roll dread.
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So, some initial theorems would be: talent = YouTube; talent + music = YouTube; practically anything + music = YouTube. All of the results are interesting and watchable. Yet here is another way to frame the new medium in an equation: Internet video − pornography = YouTube.
YouTube is in some sense created by the primary exclusion of porn. Rigorous and even ruthless policing seems to be what allows the new medium to exist at all. Pornography is a subsidiary genre in most media—the film, the novel, even photography—but somehow the Internet had to be completely saturated with porn, swimming, really, in pornographic videos, before something like YouTube could come to join it. In the very short time since the Internet’s invention, Internet video by amateurs has been almost entirely, ubiquitously, of people having sex.
See if you can retrieve, in your noncomputer memory, this image: a small window on the old CRT screen of “amateur” people grainily humping. The first time you waited patiently for the upload and saw such a thing, at the end of the twentieth century, you couldn’t have known you were looking at a major new video form. Especially when this crude image at first looked so much like old pornographic nickelodeons and stag films; and where it was confusingly mixed in with professional porn, broadcast through other Web sites. But on the Internet, the amateur, apparently self-produced, self-uploaded form turned out to be the fundamental genre, even when creepy professional exploiters entered to film or disseminate “amateurs” (as the lines blurred) after the huge underground pool of self-exposers was struck like a gusher of oil just beneath decorum’s crust.
The classic explanation of porn’s success on the Internet was that it furnished a new private medium—solitary, visual, and intimately sized—creating a special opportunity for arousal for those who could use it for a solitary and intimate activity, masturbation. There was an odd kind of isomorphism where, typing and clicking on your keyboard, especially on a laptop, it seemed the object of desire itself was put into your hands (or lap). Nakedness and humping were easy to find, access, hide, and revisit. “Sex” seemed the basic abstraction in all of this. One was viewing “sex.” Yet with the amateurs, one begins to see that sex was not the only appeal, otherwise the Internet would have been completely conquered by the professionals. Something else was going on. What YouTube tells us, hit after millionth hit, is that we like watching amateurs. We don’t necessarily just want to see them standing around, either (the twenty-four-hour nonpornographic webcams like JenniCam seem to have gone out of fashion some years ago). No, we like to see them perform, whatever the performance may be.
Amateur pornography swept the Internet not only because it was the most immediately arousing of instant genres, but because it was the performance par excellence which requires no talent. One only needs the willingness to be seen, or shown: one doesn’t have to be especially good at humping (though of course in a wide enough selection people will make judgments on the quality of anything, and the comment-and-rating interfaces of some post-your-own porn Web sites allowed viewers to act as judges of every show).
The pornlessness of YouTube, meanwhile, is paradoxically accentuated by its ruses and teases used to lead you off-site, to where real porn exists, just a mouse click away. There seem to be countless triple-X promises made by women (well-covered in underwear) with Web addresses begging you to visit them someplace else; these videos, too, seem to exist only till they’re caught, like animals loose in the zoo, and tranquilized and taken down by YouTube’s vigilant monitors—professionals tasked with this work of culling, following the allegedly huge citizen-army of YouTube viewers and deciding what isn’t okay (if the “inappropriate content” is “flagged for review”). People still do search for nudity in this one place where you are guaranteed not to find it—I know I’ve looked—where even a video labeled “Britney Spears topless photos” does not show Britney Spears “topless” but an endlessly repeated zoom of her bare shoulders and neck. (That one has twenty-three and a half million hits.)
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Remove the sex act from self-display and real old-fashioned talents return to the fore—my beloved dancing and singing, for example. But the traditional talents are, I’ve noticed, now mainly mediated talents: very few people break through on YouTube with songs they have written themselves, but very many garner clicks with performances of famous songs from other people. No one makes it very far with an improvised guitar solo, but there are vast webs of appreciation for people who can play (only their hands and guitar neck showing) a breakdown from Jimi Hendrix or Jimmy Page.
Sadly, the talent which has not yet emerged to my satisfaction is one of my favorites, that of talking. YouTube is full of things called v-logs, or vlogs, short for video logs, but connected in spirit to the early text blogs. They are, by and large, awful. I think they are so bad because they’re monologues addressed to an audience which cannot give immediate feedback and force adjustments. Even the low-end talk shows one finds on community access television or college radio have guests and interlocutors to keep things moving, whereas vlogs usually only have a mute and infinitely patient screen-mounted webcam. The highest talent these vloggers could rise to, drawn from the non-Internet world, would seem to be stand-up comedy, and most vlogs are meant to be comic (or ranting, in the manner of talk-show ranters and talk-radio ranters). But good ranting is hard to find performed by people who are utterly alone. Talking on the Web is best when it’s done in passion to someone, and taped surreptitiously or by paparazzi (as we know from TMZ.com); talking into a webcam at the top of a home monitor does not bring out the same genius performance principle that even solitary dancing or playing the guitar or stripping does. This, then, is another reason for the preponderance of music on YouTube: like at parties, it substitutes for anyone having to talk.
In fact, the talkers are at their best when they are writing satirical lyrics for the music-video parodies which are one of the newly emerging YouTube genres (professional record-company music videos have found a second life on YouTube anyway). The music already exists, ripe for parody; the three-minute format of a pop song seems to be about the length that can be managed with home editing equipment, and it conveniently matches the attention span of the viewer forced to listen to words. Indeed, the talkiest songs are the ripest for parody, which suggests
that there may be ways to rehabilitate talking performance after all.
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The biggest mistake you could make about YouTube would be accepting the idea that it allows individuals to make television. Television remains a capital-intensive and employee-intensive medium. It has ceded no ground. The videos on YouTube have very little to do with situation comedy or teleplay drama, and they even have surprisingly little to do with experimental or personal cinema—a form that individuals with less capital have found ways to use in the past. In fact, the single strongest intersection of YouTube with television is when people post things recorded from television. You can see the best soccer goals of the week, and gaffes in interviews, and bits of Japanese, Spanish, and Lebanese television (including Lebanese belly dancing), just as you can find Adorno from German television and assorted intellectuals debating on French talk shows and, indeed, assorted clips from talk shows and sports and game shows all over the world.
This fact points to an immense capability of YouTube: that it could become a comprehensive archive for television, the medium which has never had a publicly accessible archive. People post old commercials and theme songs and scenes from their favorite shows—I have no idea how they already possess them—and, again, musical performances by the great and gone, and we finally have contact with what has been lost and invisible to us except in fugitive memory. (I spent an evening watching ads from my childhood and have once again seen the Honeycomb Cereal commercial where André the Giant appears: memory confirmed; the great and gone revived; plus that catchy jingle!)
If YouTube begins the job of archiving television, it unfortunately also replicates the mistake of television, its memorylessness, by lacking a usable archive of its own content. Items come and go, and though it’s possible to see what’s Most Popular Today, Last Week, and Last Month, one cannot go back to a single day or week or month of traffic specifically to see what was popular then. So YouTube becomes another of these media without a recorded history—never mind that long-gone historical television clips disappear for copyright reasons as soon as the capital-rich media conglomerates discover them; never mind that there are ever more third-party companies devoted to discovering and rooting out this copyrighted material. And that is why, despite its fathomless reservoir of our talents, foibles, and entertainments, YouTube is not truly ours. YouTube will never be an accurate representation of “us” until it allows us to juxtapose in one space all copyrighted visual specimens made by Hollywood alongside a chronological archive of all the singing, satire, accident, and, yes, bootie dancing, done in response to Hollywood—as homage, parody, or substitution—in our millions of amateur bedrooms.
[2008]
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An update: I suspect I was wrong about vlogs. Monologues, rants, tearful confessions, bad jokes….I don’t really like them, but plenty of people do, and I suspect they’re ultimately pretty good. Seven years later, they still remain a blind spot for me. More appealing to me personally has been the previously unimaginable, vast genre of “unboxing” videos: movies made by the purchasers of brand-new power tools, car vacuums, digital cameras, DVD players, etc., for the thrill and education of others considering the same acquisition, to show what happens when you take it home and unbox the Styrofoam, tape, plastic bags, and finally the immaculate new product.
I’ve come to think that YouTube is curiously unvicarious, as compared to other media: you don’t really watch, as you would television or a movie, for experience or pleasure inconceivable or inaccessible to you. The expectation—at least the attitude evinced—is that you, the viewer, will soon do the thing pictured, too, and enjoy the benefits displayed. And somehow you do watch and take possession even when you don’t, or won’t, ever really own the thing or have the experience. A funny democracy of instruction has really come to the fore. Clips will teach you how to disassemble the laptop on which you are watching (to replace components), how to play top hits on guitar, new patterns for a child’s Rainbow Loom, how to load bullets in a magazine or film in an antique camera. Anything done with hands will be filmed, in promise that the camera’s point of view will become your eyes, and yours the fingers manipulating a screwdriver onscreen. The evolution of “reaction videos,” too—these YouTube clips of innumerable individual faces as they watch, for the first time, other YouTube clips which are scary, funny, or endearing—came as a surprising new genre that instantly seemed obvious. The “virality” but localism of YouTube, its small-scale feeling and nonvicariousness, would mean that any video you enjoyed must also be seen being enjoyed by others—after it is imaginatively understood, somehow, that you’ve already pressed the clip on every one of your family and friends. It emerges that the feeling of broadcast doesn’t need a very big audience, or doesn’t effectively distinguish between big and small audiences—between ten viewers, and ten thousand—to accomplish its same feeling of publicity, especially when reception can be shifted over time as you leave a posted video “up.” One month later you have one hundred viewers, one year later either a hundred and one or those full ten thousand. Other people will eventually “find things,” find everything, either through search terms or wandering byways of links through what others have looked at.
The problem for generalization is that I therefore don’t really know how others use YouTube, except when I happen to encounter, in life, friends or family looking at some completely unfamiliar category of video, which they take as their norm, evincing surprise at my watching habits—as does frequently happen. “My” view of YouTube gets taken for the medium itself, but the way in which YouTube is always showing you previously unimagined uses casts doubt on the whole method of criticism, taking your individual experience as representative. I was amazed, for example, to find YouTube becoming, for me, chiefly a vehicle for music—music only, I mean, in audio form, and not footage of musicians. I fell for a while into the world of people who post videos of “needle drops,” or complete plays of different rare jazz and rock LPs, singles, even 78s. The video is usually a stationary shot of the record sleeve, propped up on a stand, or the interior label, and occasionally of the vinyl record actually revolving. The wittiest collector was a Japanese “whole album” demigod who was posting rare Blue Note vinyl LPs accompanying a static shot of a kind of grandiose phonograph shrine he’d built, in which only his sleeping bulldog, at bottom left, breathed and moved as the instruments played. But I don’t think using YouTube almost exclusively as a music service is the norm—is it?
Here, though, as I suspect in lots of other subworlds I don’t see, the owners of YouTube kept intervening to erase things. Uploads of popular songs, variously sourced and recorded, somehow redirected searchers to the new, slick corporate universe of Vevo, a moneyed “music service” run by the studios and dense with compulsory advertisements. Supposedly YouTube possesses a music-matching service that recognizes and blocks uploads of songs that have already been eradicated at the behest of music studios.
Meanwhile, “The Evolution of Dance” was dethroned as the most-watched video of all time. Initially, I think, by another vernacular marvel, “Charlie Bit My Finger.” Then, however, by one or another official major-label music video, and the most-viewed list has belonged to professional jobs from the studios ever since.
The reason does not seem to be that WeTube has lost interest in the We, but that YouTube has increasingly disclosed its true possession by the They. Each year it further consolidates its will to make money from advertising and do the bidding of conglomerates at its own level. Google bought the site in 2006, and has relied on the shortness of memory, and our inability to protest anyway, to make YouTube each year a little bit worse. And possibly nothing has changed YouTube in seven years as importantly as the ads. Unlike television, to which commercials were indigenous—the skunks, mosquitos, and snakes of that particular media ecology—the compulsory commercials preceding YouTube videos now, and now interrupting at intervals the replay of long recordings, are invasive species, purely extraneous and insu
lting.
