PART ONE: I would have to agree with that quote. As a casual/frequent user of YouTube, I don't really think about the political or economic implications of its use. With any "participatory culture" there will be questions like this. Facebook has the question of age limits, MySpace has the question of privacy, and so forth. With YouTube, the questions are different. There are certainly people capitalizing on celebrity and creativity reached on YouTube, but there is a question about how one can monetize all of the hard work that was put in to create a video or videos. This question was the butt of an episode-long joke on "South Park," so it certainly has been thrown around.
I always assume that everyone can participate, and I feel that due to the popularity of the site more and more people try to. It is interesting how some videos become so much more popular than others. Sometimes I will watch a video and think, "How the hell has this gotten 5 million views??" Certainly more important voices get thrown under the rug for silly videos of people falling down. More and more are using YouTube to and try and voice politics, but I feel that even more are using it for much simpler purposes.
It is interesting to wonder about the authority on YouTube. With so many videos, it seems incredibly hard to look at them all and "police" them if you will. But there are more and more entities with interests being compromised, so they do a lot of the policing too.
PART TWO: "Hey Girl" and "Lonelygirl15" are two more examples of videos who's popularity is incomprehensible to me. Nothing about those videos interests me at all. When I read about the mythology behind "Hey Girl," it was exactly what I thought it would be. Two girls dancing. That's it. They weren't trying to get millions of hits, but they miraculously did. The person that responded to their question of why the video was so popular with, "Because it's reality" needs to get a life. If you need to go to your computer to get a three minute slice of reality, you are in big trouble. Hopefully this doesn't become some weird alternate reality, where we need to go on YouTube to get our daily fill of "reality" and escape our own awful existences...
It didn't surprise me that the Lonelygirl15 video was fake. Once I watched a few more, they all began to look incredibly scripted. The "Is it real?" ploy is a very strong tactic to gain views, and thusly gain popularity. Obviously that wasn't the intention, but once people caught on they rolled with it. Plus, there was no way that girl was 16.
PART THREE: I like the design of YouTube. It is easy to navigate, the site offers recommendations for videos you might be interested in, and it's easy to share these videos. I don't necessarily like the comment function. Too many people get out of hand, and the comments get way off track and into personal battles between people commenting. The new redesign is also a little awkward. It will take a while to get used to, because it probably won't get changed back.
Compared to other social networking sites: I only really use Facebook, so that is the only basis I have. The biggest difference that I can see is the availability of everything the site has to offer without the need for a membership. You can see pretty much anything you want even if you aren't signed up. I think you need the privacy settings for sites like Facebook, but YouTube doesn't really require it.
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