/Threaded/ Age of the youniverse
04/03/2007 | Filed under Discover > Threaded
Enough fidgeting in front of a cam trying to be the next big thing. According to Oliver Lindberg, it’s time to turn this medium into an art from.
What a year 2006 was! We had a mad blending scientist (www.willitblend.com), a fake teenage videoblogger (www.lonelygirl15.com) and a fat kid from Brooklyn ranting about Starbucks (www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1IV0cb0EiM).
Every day, more than 65,000 videos go up on YouTube and more than 100 million videos are watched. Everybody is desperate to be the next big thing. Fame came along, too – whether you wanted it or not. The 20-year-old hotel receptionist Brooke “Brookers” Brodack, for instance, became the first performer to have been discovered on YouTube (www.youtube.com/brookers). More than 21 million people saw her videos, which won her a contract with NBC TV.
Nobody cares, however, whether you actually want to be famous. YouTube is full of involuntary stars such as “the Bus Uncle”. Hong Kong resident Chan Yuet Tung became universally known when a clip showing him having a verbal outburst on a bus appeared on YouTube (www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSHziqJWYcM). The sixminute video turned into a cultural phenomenon in Hong Kong, and catchphrases like “not settled” and “you have pressure, I have pressure” suddenly appeared on posters and radio programmes. Fame didn’t bring Chan happiness, though. Although he managed to land a job at a restaurant, The Steak Expert, in the aftermath of the incident, he was physically assaulted on the job by three masked men. A few days later, the wife of the restaurant owner attempted suicide to force her husband to fire Chan, after which he resigned. Jeez.
YouBlog
The sheer amount of short-lived YouTube memes has made it difficult to keep track. Thankfully, there are “Best of” YouTube blogs such as topoftube.blogspot.com and thebestofyoutube.com. Other blogs cater for more specialist niches. Tuberaider concentrates on the hip hop culture (www.hiphopmusic.com/best_of_youtube), the Utube blog (theutubeblog.com) on the whole videosharing industry and tvinjapan.com on, well, have a guess. The legally dubious Indie Tube, meanwhile, enables you to view top indie music videos from Arcade Fire to Yo La Tengo in a retro TV interface (www.e-work.ro/indierock/indie.php), as well as download at your convenience.
If you’re too plain lazy to keep up with blogs, you can just enter a search term in YouTube Shuffle (www.youtubeshuffle.com). It will generate a list of related videos and play them back to back. YouTube Surfing (youtubesurfing.com), the brainchild of internet entrepreneur and freelance developer Alexandre Roche, randomly selects YouTube videos, but also learns from your tastes and interests and will seek out matching clips. You can enjoy a similar channel-hopping experience at neave.tv (check out our profile of its creator Paul Neave in issue 157). Considering how huge YouTube has become in the last year, it’s surprising how little it’s used for artistic purposes. Yes, there’s quite a few freak groups in the YouTube community, but “Real Housewives” and “Miss HorrorFest” can hardly be called art. A bit closer comes Backspace, a series of experimental short films to provoke your imagination (www.backspace.com.au and youtube.com/groups_videos?name=backspace). There are also only 68 mashups of YouTube’s API, and few are really innovative. One of the best is creating “coverpops”, Jim Bumgardner’s themed mosaics of hundreds of YouTube thumbnails (www.coverpop.com/pop/youtube). Also worth checking out is virtualvideomap.com, a mashup of Google Maps and YouTube, and vdiddy.com, which shows you 12 examples of what others are watching on the major video sites.
What does it all mean? Well, get your finger out and show us you’ve deserved the Time Magazine cover. Stop goofing around doing the Numa Numa dance and use YouTube for something proper. You know you want to.
