Is YouTube User-Friendly?
Adapted from a Plugged In Magazine article by Jeremy Lees and Bob Smithouser
YouTube is helping Andrea Hermitt homeschool her two children. In fact, she calls the video-sharing Web site her favorite online instructional tool. Since its inception in 2005, it has assisted her in teaching subjects ranging from fractions to World War II. But for all of its educational value, Hermitt worries about the sea of YouTube material that might teach her children the wrong things, noting, "You never know if someone is going to load something inappropriate."
Even if you're less hip than Hermitt to the streaming-video phenomenon, you've probably at least heard of YouTube. In the summer of 2006 it was one of the fastest-growing sites on the Web, outpacing MySpace on its way to being dubbed "Invention of the Year" by Time. It was also among PC World Magazine's "Top-10 Best Products of 2006." Nevertheless, while the site has been heralded as a user-friendly repository for everything from movie clips and home videos to hard-to-find concert snippets, it has also been questioned for postings of copyrighted material and, of greater concern to parents, risqué images including celebrity sex footage.
A Strange New Online World
Most teens have already tinkered with this site or, at the very least, heard friends and classmates bonding over the clip du jour. If your adolescent has never dabbled on YouTube, he or she is part of a shrinking minority. Determining the ages of YouTube's 120 million worldwide users is tricky, but there's no overestimating its importance to teens, who spend 72 hours per week using electronic media. Says Jim Taylor, vice chairman of the research firm the Harrison Group, "Teen life has become a theatrical, self-directed media production."
The prevalence of video cell phones combined with the relative ease of online posting has made YouTube a forum for amateur cyberjournalism. The site has even scooped traditional media, as when a video-camera user uploaded footage of Michael Richards of "Seinfeld" fame unleashing a torrent of racial slurs at a Los Angeles comedy club. YouTube also broke the story of Montana Republican Conrad Burns falling asleep in a Senate hearing.
But news seekers be warned: YouTube's lack of authoritative gatekeepers and pro-family filters demands that users be "critical viewers." William Romanowski, author of Eyes Wide Open: Looking for God in Popular Culture, explained, "YouTube offers a source of alternative ideas, from news to entertainment. But this kind of information doesn't go through the same scrutiny as would a scholarly article, news show or [packaged] entertainment product."
YouTube is also a stage for emerging talent. When the WB network passed on a sitcom fittingly titled "Nobody's Watching," the pilot was leaked to YouTube, much to the delight of several hundred thousand users. NBC responded by purchasing the show. Most famous among YouTube's rising stars is South Korean guitarist Lim Jeong-hyun who, face obscured, stunned YouTubers with a five-minute rocked-up arrangement of Pachelbel's Canon.
The original version of this article appeared in the June 2007 issue of Plugged In Magazine.