YouTube

is just the latest salvo in the case of media eating itself big time. So much more is coming: collaborative editing, dynamic documentary, hyperfilm, panopticon, WikiPedia Media... My personal feeling is that we are beginning to experience the reknitting together of our lost and fractionated culture and wisdom atom by atom in the nanotechnological loom of internetworked dynamism. We are also about to see a lot of light and truth being shone into innumerable dark areas where legions of powermongers have been able to keep Big Media Eyes blinded and Mouths muzzled. But Big Media cannot seem to get what the YouTube phenomenon is about, because it is the exact inverse of Big Media. The reality is literally invisible to them. So naturally, Big Media is reporting about the size of the deal without doing justice to the inversion of all the key relationships it thinks are the rules of the game: Winner Take All becomes Longtail; expensive "professional" formulaic production becomes whatever works; stars become everyman; timeslots become the eternal now; the elite director becomes some guy you know or who's just like you; 500 channels become millions and millions; and writing becomes curiously irrelevant. Perhaps most importantly, "what we want to see" is actually determined by what we want to see instead of by some cabal of cynical tastemakers with a dim and predatory view of humanity. That said, apparently some of what "we want to see" is in fact, pretty dim. Here's a great blog from Steve Rosenbaum on Huffpo that explains Why All the Media Has it All Wrong about Google/YouTube.