Speaker’s cornerDenise Horan
I’M slow to be won over by new trends. Doc Martens were out for about five years before I saw the appeal. For a whole term, I sat in my room in college every time ‘Friends’ came on TV, while my housemates roared their heads off laughing downstairs. Friends (real ones) still remind me of my promise never to get a mobile phone.
Over time, I gradually bowed to the wisdom of the majority and converted to being a fan of all three (though the Docs have since been set aside). But there’s one bandwagon I’ll never jump on, not for all the ice in Greenland. YouTube. I set about investigating its appeal a few weeks ago for the purpose of writing about it. So I logged onto the site and began to browse. Twenty minutes later – requiring minute-by-minute self-cajoling to stick with it – I gave up. I was bored. I just don’t get the hype and, no, in this case, I’m not for turning.
During my brief encounter with this free video sharing website – which was named TIME magazine’s ‘Invention of the Year’ for 2006, God help us – I did a search for Mayo and later for Castlebar (prompted by a story in The Mayo News some time earlier about an apparent racially-motivated incident in the county town which was posted as a video clip on the site). I’d like to report that I found some fascinating videos or unearthed some great scandal, but, alas, I must disappoint. There was a lengthy Shell to Sea clip, detailing the scandal of the Corrib gas project, some Mayo GAA videos (including ‘highlights’ of the Mayo v Kerry All-Ireland Final of 2006), several of cars doing doughnuts or wheelies (or whatever it’s called when cars spin around in a circle at high speed) in a Castlebar car park and various clips from house parties. The drivel went on…and on…and on. I went home.
Apart from the fact that the content wasn’t all that riveting, the videos themselves won’t be claiming cinematography prizes anytime soon. The faces were barely recognisable in most (maybe that’s the intention, I don’t know) and the sound quality was equally poor. So, given the choice of sitting in front of a computer screen straining your eyes watching bad video clips with bad sound and bad pictures or looking out the window at a dull, drizzly day, I ask: why would anyone choose the former? It really is beyond me.
There is a sinister side to this all-pervasive phenomenon too. The video clips featured in The Mayo News of a group of foreign nationals being taunted and chased down the street by a group in Castlebar is just one example. Last week national attention was drawn to clips of alleged assaults or attempted assaults on members of the Gardaí, while another featured a man urinating against a Garda car. One of these assaults has already been viewed by 24,000 people on YouTube. Incidents of ‘happy slapping’, where assaults on people are carried out for the very purpose of them being filmed and viewed by hundreds, or even thousands, of people are also becoming more common.
That people actually have an appetite for viewing this kind of material is particularly worrying. But then most people, by nature, are inclined to do things they know they really shouldn’t, so if the material is available it will inevitably be viewed, thus giving oxygen to this perverse pursuit by the video-makers.
There are 67 people working at the site’s headquarters in San Bruno, USA, and there is a facility whereby people can report excessively violent videos (similar facilities apply to copyright infringements), but, in practice, this does not deal adequately with the inappropriateness of some of its content.
Much like mobile phones with video recording abilities, the question of where privacy begins and ends in the world of YouTube arises. But the reality is it’s too late to do anything about it. In a survey conducted in July of last year it was found that 100 million clips are viewed daily on YouTube. It might be 150 million by now. As an Elvis Presley album cover from the 1970s proclaimed: ‘50,000,000 fans can’t be wrong’. Maybe it’s me so.
