Friday, April 2, 2010

YouTube and the World

                One of the most technologically advanced ages arrived with the turn of the century and with it newer more efficient means of conveying and accessing information. Every day millions of people are accessing an online video resource, which 5 years ago didn’t exist, that has revolutionized our world. It has stretched so far in influence that it has even begun to make its way into classrooms as a teaching resource and political debates as a means of targeting a younger voting audience. The website responsible for opening this rather large, ever expanding can of worms is YouTube, a video-sharing website that had been created by three former PayPal employees in February of 2005. YouTube became one of the most frequently visited sites, right up there with Google and Facebook and, as a result, whole video-sharing communities were formed around video-sharing. As posts started coming in the form of video blogging, people from around the world were enabled to interact with one another in a new and radically different way on the internet, and so new internet “etiquette” took shape. YouTube has had a profound effect on the world on the social, political and even educational level.
                It was an $11.5 million dollar investment that took off from the moment beta testing was released in May of 2005; YouTube’s bandwidth usage exploded with video content pouring in with 65,000 videos being uploaded every day by June of 2006. As with all new communication avenues, whole communities began to form and were categorized under different genres of video postings such as “Comedy”, “Education”, “Entertainment”, “Music”, “People & Blogs”, “News & Politics” and more. As opposed to only being able to interact through written texts as with chat (i.e. AIM, AOL), or live video conferencing (i.e. Skype, Oovoo, Tokbox), YouTube continues to break through as a totally unique method of interaction on the internet since it utilizes both chat and video, though not as a live interaction. This allows any and every individual to not only interact with certain persons, but to even address the entire YouTube-watching community as a whole! In essence, the ability to actively communicate and interact with the world by way of video has been opened up to the individual through this video-sharing website.
                As people began to refine their YouTube video postings of all genres, educators began to see its potential for classroom use as a new and easy-to-use teaching tool. A study was conducted in the spring semester of 2008 to test the effectiveness of using YouTube as a teaching tool by assigning a sample of graduate students from King’s College and undergraduate students from Rowan University projects that involved creating a video tutorial on biology topics and posting it to YouTube (Fralinger and Owens, 2009). The students were later asked if they would use YouTube videos in their professions as educators, and it was found that “because most of the graduate students were also working in the field, they were able to see more potential benefits of incorporating You Tube into their respective professions” (Fralinger and Owens, 2009), and were thus more open to utilizing YouTube as a teaching tool. In fact, it had been embraced as such an effective means of conveying classroom information that the University of California in Berkley uploaded videos of full courses available on YouTube in October of 2007, becoming the first university to do so.
                This incredible means of communication and information-sharing didn’t escape the attention of the political world. The opportunity to connect younger generations of voters to political candidates and making information more readily accessible and understandable was an irresistible, and so beginning in May of 2007, “CNN and YouTube joined together to sponsor two nationally televised presidential primary debates” (McKinney and Rill, 2009). The goal was to “to determine if a debate message specifically tailored to young voters, utilizing the very methods of communication familiar to young citizens and incorporating young citizens in the debate dialogue, can foster heightened attitudes of political engagement” (McKinney and Rill, 2009). The results were astounding. Young people responded enthusiastically; nearly 8,000 video questions were posted on YouTube directed towards political candidates running for president in both the Republican and Democratic debates, 60% of which were submitted by citizens under the age of 30.
                The YouTube website in and of itself may not be a new form of technology but it has certainly brought about an innovative, new way to utilize the internet technology that we’ve had. In a very short span of time, YouTube has quickly become the standard (and by this I mean most widely used) means of video-sharing, just as Google has become the standard search engine for the internet. As result of the creation of YouTube, internet video-sharing is quickly becoming the main tool for conveying and searching for information; the genres of information that are being transferred and shared in video format are still expanding and growing. So long as people find more things to share, YouTube will continue to be one of the greatest arms of communication in the world today.










Citations
1.     McKinney, M. S. & Rill, L. A. (2009). Not Your Parents' Presidential Debates: Examining the Effects of the CNN/YouTube Debates on Young Citizens' Civic Engagement. Communication Studies, 60(4), 392-406. doi:10.1080/10510970903110001
2.       Fralinger, B., & Owens, R.. (2009). You Tube As A Learning Tool. Journal of College Teaching and Learning, 6(8), 15-28.  Retrieved April 1, 2010, from ABI/INFORM Global. (Document ID: 1940610531).
3.       YouTube. (2010, April 1). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 08:51, April 1, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=YouTube&oldid=353292185

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