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You Generation: How Big Business Turns You Into Asset

Written by: Herb Gilliland

Article Overview: Article reprinted from the book "A Universe of Interactions", by H. Elwood Gilliland III, edited by Ziva Borlja

You Generation: How Big Business Turns You Into Asset

Article reprinted from the book "A Universe of Interactions", by H. Elwood Gilliland III, edited by Ziva Borlja YouTube is a tool for creativity. It was a first-mover so it provided the most successful architecture both psychological and technical. Before YouTube there was U-Tube, a similar design and implementation that existed pre-2003 as a dark-background, purple colored 10 point Arial website that disappeared shortly after the upheavals in business following U.S. Economic downturn in 2001. Before U-Tube there was the Synthetic Interview, an artificial life program which enabled synthetic discussion via video and keyword search. In this way, a scripted interaction could take place that gave the illusion of openended communication. This was Eliza meets vlog meets online video website. The innovation of YouTube is merely a brand, repackaging existing technologies, enabled by the resounding success of a Wikinomic market driven purely by consumer contribution.

YouTube involved a simple but global application of video content presentation based on existing fundamental perceptions of television and sociology. It was designed for the simplicity of a busy lifestyle, and does not require great aptitude with technology. It is, in essence, an extension of the trend in camera and was enabled by Adobe Flash, which unified video players and resolved conflict between the previous leaders in the tech business. Its creators had a vision for success of the tool, but the full impact is complete, global and was designed this way as a social platform. The original spark of this innovation was a concatenation of video content, Warhol's famous quote and the social need of human vanity. To use Warhol's "15 minutes of fame" as a metric, YouTube's "10 minutes of fame" displays the level of exploitation in the contemporary world. From the earliest inception, YouTube is an example of the application of sociological and technological conventions of the mediums present in its synthesis. This was the point where web video began to become successively viral. Prior to this, one of the first "viral videos" was the 3D baby dancing, and the many later variations on this.

Humanity, of course, being the fundamental source for dramatic aspects of its predecessor, television conventions, and the web as its final element of hybridization. YouTube was conceived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in a small apartment. It came from years of observation and secrecy and was revealed to Chad Hurley in a phone conversation. The actual demarcation of the moment when YouTube could have been created occurred in 2003, during one of the last Late Night appearances of John Ritter, he observed the proliferation of young filmmakers with DV cameras. The need for YouTube could have been met with the successive release of Flash 7, shortly thereafter. At the time, however, there was little proof of the Wiki model of consensus-based user contributed web content until the Wikipedia reached a critical mass. In a matter of months, Wikipedia was dramatically engaged by the internet community enabling it to become the rich content provider it is today. This showed a convergence of technology and society and was

the evidence for opportunity.

The brand was an obvious leading example, because it challenged the paradigm of brand on the Web. Its fundamental ideas, what will become its optimal inception, are a conglomeration of both internet and television convention. It makes fun of complex interactivity, and is a jab at the elitism of early computer hobbyism. It is designed for the intellectual who lacks technical astuteness. The way YouTube developed drew from the television broadcasting history of Pittsburgh, the entire history of drama, thus an inherent part of the human experience, and, like history is often known to do, it rhymed with references to its predecessors and conceiver, and harmonized with its intended audience.

Pittsburghers birthed local broadcasting, and later a Pittsburgher birthed YouTube telepresently. Competition will help to increase quality of online user-submitted video content, but the idea core to "You" and "Tube" creates rippling synergy, harmonizing with the simpler idea of what the computer is capable of as a communications mediator. This answered the question "what about video phones?" with "what about video email?" - not a new concept, but one which began to demonstrate the connection between writing and video. Both being linear forms, these two are woven together with strong bonds that continue the relationship between writing and acting as inseparable components of linear media. Those specialties continue, despite their surface appearance as being simple, unabated in the contemporary paradigm and further localized by expansive and inherent desire of human beings to convey messages in the most telepresent of forms. What solved the Video/Phone conundrum was separating telecommunications from dramaturgy, and providing a platform for performance rather than a videographic alternative to telephony.

YouTube will continue to display the trend of synthesizing conventions from both existing architecture of video and the architecture of the web, to enable the video internet to act in ways that have never before been seen. What will occur in the short-term is the continued borrowing of conventions from existing communications platforms for the web: the forum, the mail reader and the blog. What will occur in the long-term requires innovation in video processing and new paradigms of computation, information visualization and artificial intelligence. But what makes YouTube successful is the brand, with the standard of usability that is unmatched in its industry. YouTube streamlines the production pipeline, simplifying production and providing the end-user with a simple interface, uniting a diverse platform of video codecs and formats, to provide the easiest and most conclusive combination of form and function that limits the experience of publishing and simplifies, in a user-centric way, the process of development. The down-side to this freedom is the level of exploitation present in the YouTube community, both of existing copyright law and of the community itself.

The automation of Hollywood is the aim of this type of community. In examples like on-demand publishing, this is simply the on-demand television broadcasting service - an answer to the ondemand radio station. This completes the media loop, enabling the common internet user to broadcast video, sound and text in a pseudotraditional way. It is an attempt at equalization, but this is misperceived as a platform for video piracy. The devaluation of work translates to poverty for all, which is why the government rules in favor of the victim in copyright infringement. Although large corporations control a great deal of art-commodity, the fact remains that what is permissible as a crime against a corporation is directly translatable to crimes against humanity, under capital.

YouTube is designed as a virus: it was a viral event, but it was also designed to help revolutionize a completely unplanned part of modern society: celebrity. It's goal is not to deplete the resources that are allocated to celebrity in modern society, but rather it was designed as a way to decentralize celebrity and the celebrity selection process. Everyone deserves celebrity who contributes positively to society. The problem has been the exclusivity of celebrity and the barriers to entry that have become almost impenetrable in the centennial Hollywood.

Randy Pausch may state that "the brick walls are there for a reason," and while this is true, what Pausch fails to realize is that the walls successfully keep out and marginalize unheard voices for reasons that are more than just based on the content delivered as evidence of performance: they marginalize ideas for political and social reasons. The walls are there to keep people out: that is what they are designed to do. It is more than just a security measure, it is the brutality of primitiveness and a crude form of selection. While occasionally the magic key is found and one may enter, it is inhumane, inefficient and brutal to the majority. Brutality destroys creativity and business, limits possibility, marginalizes alternatives and is a symptom of perspective. It is inhumane to keep creative and eccentric thinkers outside of the mainstream because they do not conform to some preconceived notion of what "should be" -- the people who make such decisions are usually in need of something more than just talent: it is often an introverted, self-ascribed inadequacy and nervousness which generates what is ultimately an ineffective and primitive understanding of what talent, creativity and genius truly are.

Many user-generated services, like LULU.com and YouTube.com, seek to revolutionize the fundamental structure of established business models, eroding the exclusion principle of business and pulverizing the barriers that impede the individual from succeeding. It is democratization, purely, one which enables people with machines.

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Article Tags: automation, brand, elwood, exploitation, gilliland, invention, inventor, universe, youtube



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