Ways of Seeing

In the annals of “Cultural Vacuity,” I think YouTube now proves that people are truly bored with life. When you’re bored, you pick up a camera and point it out the window, or turn the lens on yourself. Now you are engaged. You have something to shoot. You have something to say. Or do you??

One of the top video clips in the past week or so on YouTube is that of a kitten falling asleep. Ten million views in a matter of days. Or you can watch a motivational speaker do a strip tease. Perhaps you want to watch an African American male talk to his friend on the phone and disquisit on “Why I hate niggers.” Those are his words, and the title of his little telephone tête-à-tête. Maybe you’d like to watch children reading books. Yes. YouTube has that, too. It’s the Christmas (oops! “Holiday”) season, so you can watch dozens of people singing carols, reading from their yearly family recap letters that they used to mail out. You can learn how to make various bombs: smoke bomb, stink bomb, dry ice bomb, bicarbonate of soda pressure bomb, and even such an innocuous item as a hydrochloric acid bomb. And, you can watch someone “taking a shit.”

I found all these little ditties with simple searches for the crassest possible things (perhaps also dangerous to the public) people might do to gain fame. Not Andy Warhol’s famous prediction about gaining fame. These YouTubers are on the Web, home of the nanosecond fame variety. Now, one may ask rightly why those who run and police YouTube (if they do at all) allow the purely drivel to stay on the site. They would rightly reply, I imagine, that it’s a democratic process and people can sink or swim on their merits. Others can rightly ask why Google has paid more than $1 billion for this site, where there are no less than seven pages on “stalking”; where you can learn “how to get Mario butt raped”; and my favorite (for the 10 minutes I took to plug in searches and play them), fun-filled gag videos on “how to kill your wife.” This is the unfettered brilliance of the American mind?

On the other hand, YouTube is a good microcosm of what happens when people ARE loosed on the world with a video camera AND given a place to show it to a worldwide audience, to all who might want to lose quality time with loved ones, or a good book, or something written, acted, and produced with quality, pizzaz, chutzpah, and a little wit attached to it. Yes, where people have pushed aside television to spend many hours watching YouTube, the best clips that one can find on YouTube actually comes from Hollywood, the professionals.

Under the category of “How to masturbate” (I told you I tried to find the crassest of the crass on YouTube), among the sophomoric, the ridiculous—and the terribly homo-erotic moments assembled when males begin talking about “flogging the dolphin” on camera, and then having the temerity to upload it for the world to see (but failing mostly to spell masturbate correctly)—I found a Showtime program “Weeds” in which a 12 or 14 year-old-boy is discovered to have begun masturbating, and after his mom fails just a bit to explain the naturalness of the “act,” she puts the duty onto the boy’s father (or uncle?), with the outcome a hilarious how-to. This captured instance approaches art. It has wit. It reaches to shine a light on something that is very human. (http://youtube.com/watch?v=uIIeTXWSRZ0) “Weeds” succeeds where nothing homegrown on YouTube even germinates.

In the 1990s, when self-publishing became accessible to all those writers—for a then reasonable price of about $4,000—who otherwise couldn’t get their manuscripts read by publishing houses, editors saw that barbarians where indeed at the gate. Out of the tens of thousands of self-published books of all sorts, just about a few have made it into the mainstream—some, to the detriment of the reading public, in my opinion. But with the advent of powerful computers and web sites that can serve up equally powerful content distribution, the barbarians have not only breached the gate, they sit at the supper table now, eat with their hands and use the forks to pick their teeth. Am I being elitist? Too critical? Taking the fun out of the little time people have left in their “leisure time”? Or am I being just a little harsh on my naming so many Americans as crass? Perhaps. Just…before you judge me, spend a half hour on YouTube.

Tags: Seeing in Progress //