What I Learned From YouTube, the Song
Last semester, Alex Juhasz taught a course about YouTube at Pizer College. In that inimitable, academically immersive manner, all work for and by the class was done online, an attempt to mirror YouTube's own "amateur-led pedagogy".
One of the results: "What I Learned from YouTube", a music video (a cover of a Delilah song? Not sure, but it's funny) by two students that excoriates the site for being filled with vacuous comedy fluff. Not a new sentiment, but one you're probably accustomed to hearing from middle-aged entertainment executives instead of students.
Among the students' criticisms, one in particular leaped out at me: We may be playing air guitars / But soon we'll both be stars / Cause youtube is our best chance towards fame. An interesting comment there, as both a white collar parallel to inner city sports star hopefuls, and an acknowledgment that YouTube is a mass marketing vehicle. Interesting to think, after all these years of breathlessly extolling the virtues of democratic media, that the generation using that new media considers it to be nothing but another mass appeal crap machine.
This is perhaps a function of their being digitally in situ, and thus not removed enough from prior media experience to understand the marked change that YouTube represents. But it's also telling that online video sites are being criticized even in their infancy, suggesting that even as technology revolutionizes distribution, it's slow to change (can't change?) the sociology of hitmaking.
A few lyrics:
What I learned from youtube
Is a multitude of things like
How to fold a shirt real quickly
But some videos are so shitty
Yes its true
Lonelygirl15 we mean you
Fu-uh-ck you
