Monday, August 03, 2009

Youtube

Several days I go, I made a comment on the internet service twitter. Since then, some people have told me their opinions about twitter, as I encountered them in my course of life in Tokyo. It is always interesting to exchange ideas, in person especially, about what is currently hot.

Here I find myself writing about youtube. I have only words of praise for youtube. I confess to be a heavy user of youtube. When I am on the road in the hotel room, I tend to spend the last few minutes of the evening searching for interesting videos in youtube. Most of the time, I would watch my favorite British comedies. At other times, I would listen to my favorite music, classical or otherwise. When I am really in the mood, I might listen to lectures by intellectuals, like those provided by authors@google.

There are many wonderful things about youtube, but more than anything, I admire their slogan "Broadcast Yourself". A significant portion of the traffic might be earned by commercially produced works, but that is not, conceptually speaking, the point. The emphasis is on people in many countries, whether young or old, rich or poor, educated or tabula rasa, who have obtained a means of literally "broadcasting yourself" through youtube. The slogan, incidentally, is wide enough to include those who are professionals producing commercially supported and distributed works. The slogan "Broadcast Yourself", in a nutshell, is very well conceived indeed.

It is my opinion that the various services provided on the internet compete not only in terms of technical excellence and band width. They compete on the basis of the brilliance of philosophy that is behind the service provided. Youtube is an excellent example of "philosophy in bits".

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I often use Youtube too.
In these days, I found a brilliant video and have listened to it repeatedly.

That is a scene of the opera "Magic flute".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvuKxL4LOqc

Her high tone makes me cry, sometimes. You might know the reason of my tears.

Utako said...

Open declaration for youtube.
Though I am a beginner of youtube, I have now started to appreciate it.

I have a lot of videos and disks to see and learn dramaturgy. They begin to have particular history and context just as I regard them as films, TV dramas, documentaries. It gets difficult to find something new and interesting beyond the genre, that is what is called "--holic".

The videos on youtube and interests gathering from various regions let me break and wash a lumb of genre out. I'd like to enjoy finding "broadcasted" outrageous things.

Anonymous said...

yes, several days ago, Ms/Mr Anonymous said …

“twitter promotes anonymity (and thus equality) because you do not have to provide much personal information...the ideas from a rich person and a poor person are heard equally. The focus is on information.”

the argument was really smart and impressive, although a little difficult for me to fully understand.

It also brought my memory of the subject “practice of research methodology”because the statement probably relate to some extent to it, for example, some insights on data collection. i like to recall the time i studied that class: it was so nice.