The other week when YouTube was bought by Google, the site had a great deal of press. Here is a Youtube member responding.
One of the results of this was that the nature of the videos on there got slagged off.
For example on ‘Have I got news for you’ Andrew Neil talked about the drivel on YouTube and intimated that anyone who looked at the videos were stupid.
It seems that for a long time we have wanted our entertainment to be increasingly polished; we have wanted no chinks to shine through. We have wanted performances to be polished, the visuals to be beautiful and the dialogue clever.
But. I think that people are now going back to an enjoyment of the rough and ready and people are enjoying the amateurish. people are liking it when they see how things are done; where they can see throuh the chinks. They love the films made in people’s bedrooms or where people laugh at the wrong spot.
It reminds me of how people used to let Mummers in their houses. Or of the daft players in Midsummer nights dream - the play within the play - where no one can be mistaken that this REALLY happened. It is unashamedly, people just pretending.
See these Mummers:
See this from Midsummer Night’s Dream:
similarly so many of the youtube videos are easily penetrable - that is it is obvious that they are ordinary people making films for a range of reasons. They are unashamedly filmed in houses and tell simple stories about ordinary people. They are not supposed to be polished. See this one called ‘Drama Queen’.
Or Hope is emo.
There are squillions of these little stories.
Anyway I was listening to a programme on radio 4 about the resurgence of story tellers. (my brother is friends with two of the people on the show - Ben and Hugh - how famous is that??) Anyway the show was talking about the phenomenon of ’seeing the whites of people’s eyes’ as they tell the story. This is partly a metaphor; although they meant it literally too, that part of a live story telling experience is in the physical intimacy. I think it is also about the ability to detect the person who tells a tale as ‘like us’, as ‘close’ as ’sharing the same space’. Is this part of he appeal of Youtube’s amateurishness?
I have decided that my next piece of thinking is going to be around the ways in which social networking allows people to produce and to share in narratives in a way that has been part of our culture for hundrreds of years. I want to write about this some more.
Human beings are naturally tellers of tales and suddenly we are wanting other types of tale in addition to the polished ones that we have been getting from tv and film over the last several decades.
