YouTube/Myspace - Internet is Power?
I was thinking recently about Myspace and YouTube and the power they currently hold, and it’s quite apparent that the power and influence they can use is quite proportionate. The Internet has always been a successful communicative medium since the Internet hit home users, however I see YouTube and Myspace as exceptional cases in which they have exceeded the stereotypical Website and became major power-players in the Real World, in not only Entertainment but Politics and News.
When YouTube was founded by several former paypal members, it took the Internet and quite literally the Internet by storm. Since it’s creation there has been Internet celebrities by the boat load, however unlike any period before, there has never been this many Internet Celebrities breaking into success in the Offline world. (See lonelygirl15; Brooke Brodack) Does this mean, in another generation onwards, that the merger of Internet and Offline forms of Entertainment will be complete? If one becomes famous on the Internet, they will be famous all over? When you consider the ever-growing numbers in which this is happening, it’s not so unbelievable.
News? Both YouTube and Myspace have been mentioned in the Offline Media numerous times, often painted in a bad light. Is this due to the fact they can be considered a threat in public manipulation? Possibly, but either way they are seen as extra-successful mediums on which to reach out to the public with messages, news and commercial marketing. It’s a given now that Myspace and YouTube make more money then most TV Channels do monthly. Both are even referenced in the Offline Mediums of TV, Newspapers and Magazines. Threats? Yes, and both Google and Rupert Murdock see this medium as being the future of not contributing information but controlling it.
The problem about these mediums receiving so much power is what they can do with it. Too much power will mean sooner of later someone will slip up and use it. And conterversies relating to manipulation of the public have already occurred.
Myspace and YouTube alike have both been used by Politics as staging wars between the political parties of their respective countries, both the Australian Liberal and Labour parties, and the American Republican and Democrat parties have successfully utilized the medium. This is both a double-edged sword. On the one side, the parties reach out to an audience otherwise untapped, and on the other is the fact that utilizing these sites are effectively giving them power. As for the future of these sites, we can only guess they will grow larger and other sites will be born which in turn will be successful. But from what I can see the Internet has never been stronger, and in only a few decades, the Internet will be the biggest medium with events which will occur being literally embedded in both the Offline and Online Worlds.
Funnily enough in a September 2006 investor meeting, News Corp. COO Peter Chernin claimed that virtually all modern Web applications (naming YouTube, Flickr, and Photobucket) were really just “driven off the back of MySpace“.
How very untrue.
lonelygirl15 is cute
In the end, it comes down to people - thats what social things are all about.
Was it right to give television the power it had? Its a one way, non interactive (largely) medium.
That’s hardly a way to have a debate. That’s the way to spoon feed society, in to the mush it has become.
While I don’t particularly like MySpace/Facebook, they’re at least educating many about the web - as consumers and producers of content.