The Youtube Experience

I was required to make this blog for my Intro to Digital Media Art class. When I looked at the pages of last semester's student blogs for the course, I was a bit astonished. Most of them were titles with the course number and (at least at first glance) appeared to strictly focus on digital art in a traditional sense. The phrase traditional sense strikes me as a little irrelavent to this particular aspect of life though, so I've decided that my blog, from the start, will be much different from the cookie-cutter ones I saw. First of all, I've let the design of the page stray fairly far from the topic, as I'm sure you can see (and I'm sure it will change periodically). Secondly, I want to describe for you my experiences with this class and more generally with digital media, so expect to see references to anything from Harry Potter to Southeast Asian philosophy to Austin's Emma. I will find a way to connect it all.
For my first entry, I'll stick to what we discussed in class on Tuesday. My professor showed us part of a video about the anthropology of Youtube. Over the course of the discussion, a thought occured to me; I have gotten so much of my identity either directly through the internet, or through routes similar in nature to it. My vocabulary naturally includes verbs like google, tweet, and download as well as acronyms like LOL & FML and symbols like less-than-three. A great example of this sort of viral communication becoming ingrained in people and becoming essential to their personalities comes from a personal anecdote. Last summer, while hanging out with a group of friends, one of them insisted that I listen to a song she had on her iPod. After hearing it, I was entranced; The Midnight Beast quickly became my new favorite band and I have since liked them on facebook and seen all of their Youtube videos. The interesting part comes when i mention that these three guys are from the UK. They started out with nothing more than a single video for their parody of Ke$ha's "Tik Tok," which they posted on December 9, 2009; by Christmas of the same year, the video was featured on Youtube's main page, and it now boasts an  impressive 9,961,858 views.

My friend, it turns out, had heard the song from one of her friends, who discovered it via one of her friends, and like so the voyage of this tiny 3 minute 44 second long video made it's way across the Pond and through the iPod speakers into my ears. My love of The Midnight Beast followed suit when i clicked the links to their other videos. Their not-so-subtle humor and catchy coreography has become fairly important to the way I behave on a daily basis. I have even begun to use the word "ninja" as an adjective in daily conversations as a way of saying "really good," thanks in part to their video Ninjas, even though they maintain its noun-ness in the song. The band currently has 245,491 likes on facebook, not counting the numerous non-official pages in their honor. Their newest video was uploaded to Youtube 14 hours ago and already has 22,539 views.
The digital landscape is running over into the real world in many ways, and necessarily in a bad way. It changes us forever - there is no taking it back once it's out there - but change is a double-edged sword; there are upsides and downsides chasing eachother all over the place and it's not our job to command them, only to take them for what they are and run with it.