Washington Week: Student Voices (O)

COLUMN: Television is dead! Long live YouTube!
By Sean Manning
Daily Californian (UC-Berkeley)
04/10/2006

(U-WIRE) BERKELEY, Calif. — I often find myself relishing momentary distraction with YouTube.com, a staple of my online activity when reading Faulkner is less than inviting. For countless college students, myself included, the "Saturday Night Live" sketch "Lazy Sunday" was the gateway that has led to a more serious addiction.

Since its inception in February 2005, YouTube has become the largest outlet for video sharing on the web, pulling in over 100 million visits and 35,000 new videos on a daily basis. The user-determined content and accessibility recall the heyday of Napster — and all of the copyright baggage that they entail.

As a result, YouTube has become the home not only to staples of Internet humor like "Snakes on a Plane" paraphernalia and reenactments of every stupid flash video imaginable, but also a plethora of pop culture scraps both past and present.

There's a bizarre sense of unreality that sets in when one moment you can be watching Jon Stewart's Oscar monologue before it airs on the west coast and then follow it with a clip of a John Lennon interview from the 1970s in which he states that a Beatles reformation could be "quite possible." Streaming through YouTube's jumbled archives without regard to time or context gives the same kind of pleasure that I get out of putting my iPod on shuffle just to see what will come up. To paraphrase "Friends" alum Matthew Perry's 1997 box office disappointment "Fools Rush In," it's everything I never knew I always wanted.

But besides the novelty of moments such as Crispin Glover on a putative acid trip during a Letterman interview, there is a subversive element attracting viewers to the site that has copyright lawyers on their toes. For up-to-the-moment content, YouTube has become a filter of sorts that catches noteworthy happenings in the world of entertainment and beyond, reducing the need to watch shows composed of short segments like "Saturday Night Live," "The Daily Show" (take that, iTunes Season Pass) and late-night talk shows.

The highlights (and lowlights) always find their way onto the site's ever-expanding collection with startling speed. If not for the carnal celebrity obsession of entertainment blogs and viral video sites, would Scarlett Johansson's infamous boob-grab be the only thing anyone seems to remember about this year's Golden Globe awards?

In the age of YouTube, there will never be a repeat of the phenomenon that saw countless "Star Wars" fans piling into screenings of "Meet Joe Black" just to catch a glimpse of the trailer for "The Phantom Menace" and leaving before the feature presentation even started. A mere two days after "The Simpsons" movie teaser trailer hit YouTube, the clip drew in well over 401,000 views.

The plethora of material hitting the Web certainly reduces the appeal of broadcasts with filler and commercial breaks. The incentive to tune out was enough for NBC to demand that all of their recent "Saturday Night Live" content be pulled from the site. Despite the tantrum, YouTube's imprint on popular culture is real and relevant. The two "Lazy Sunday" stars, Andy Samber and Chris Parnell have been more prominently featured on the show since the skit hit YouTube in December 2005, and shirts inspired by the song's irreverent one-liners have appeared within walking distance of campus.

YouTube occupies a unique niche in the pantheon of file sharing services, where both the obscure and the overplayed can be enjoyed with ease. But unfortunately, the limelight that has brought about a massive influx of content has been countered by a frenzy of removals over copyright issues. Like Napster, YouTube's attention could make it another martyr for the case of file sharing, but if anything, the site's popularity has shown that the availability of free media will prevail through copyright panic.

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