The working poor take to YouTube

     The weak economy combined with low wages and high prices for food and fuel are hitting everyone where it hurts, YouTubers are uploading their stories to help themselves and others out of poverty and cyclical government programs.  $1.09 a day is what the government figures every person who is in need of food stamps and other forms of government assistance needs to be able to eat 3 healthy well rounded meals a day.  You may be capable of surviving on that much money per day, but you’ll never be able to get ahead. 

     In the PBS documentary “Waging a Living pts.1-8”, people who are making low hourly wages let their struggles be taped and explain how they got to the point in their lives where they were just barely scrapping by.  The documentary was directed and produced by Roger Weisburg who has been making films designed to enlighten the public to the plight faced by those who are forced to turn to government assistance.  “The words ‘working poor’ ought to be an oxymoron. The idea that you can work full time and still be poor in this society is a real crime,” according to Weisburg.  The number of working poor in this country is on the rise and the way that government programs are set up to handle the situation just isn’t effective.  People like Weisburg are working hard to keep poverty in the public eye and not just behind closed doors.  Here’s links to the series “Waging a Living pts. 2-8”  2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Will YouTube destroy the Internet?

     It’s a techies worst nightmare, the equivalent to an online apocalypse.  The Internet may be too big for it’s own britches within 2 years according to AT&T.  That’s right, the Internet may run out of bandwidth and video sharing sites are taking the brunt of the blame.  Vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T, Jim Cicconi spoke to industry representatives at a Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 last week.  In essence, high-definition videos are trying to force too much information through too small a space and there will be no space left by the year 2010 according to AT&T unless upgrades are made to the infrastructure of the internet.  Cnetnews.com reported that Cicconi added, “Eight hours of video is loaded onto YouTube every minute. Everything will become HD very soon, and HD is 7 to 10 times more bandwidth-hungry than typical video today. Video will be 80 percent of all traffic by 2010, up from 30 percent today.”   The estimates for the cost of renovating the Internet range from $55 billion to upgrade the United States and $130 billion to tackle the problem worldwide. 

Is the Internet the AntiChrist or just another scapegoat for lazy parents?

The internet may be desensitizing kids to violence, but didn’t that whole trend start a long time ago with television?  It’s just that now with the internet kids have their own network to broadcast violence from as opposed to just watching at home and then silently taking it out on a peer sans film crew.  YouTube is filled with videos that contain fights or other violent acts, they have policies set up that remove videos if they’re deemed violent or contain nudity.   But the task of filtering through the thousands of videos that are uploaded daily is a daunting one and it does take the site a bit of time before they can remove a video that’s been flagged.  The most recent and publicized violent video on YouTube is of 16 year-old Victoria Lindsay being attacked by six of her female classmates while two boys were posted as lookouts.  Lindsay had been lured into the home where she was attacked and then beaten unconscious, placed on the couch till she awoke and then backed into a corner and beaten some more.  All of this while one of the girls was filming the atrocious acts so that it could be posted on YouTube as some sort of ill planned revenge for Lindsay’s supposed comments about her attackers on her Myspace page.  Since police released the video of Linsdays attack to the press there has been a media circus surrounding the whole event.  It’s been an utter melee of networks fighting for coverage of the girls first court appearances and parents being interviewed and of course running the video of the beating will probably never get old.    As if the story wasn’t strange enough, Dr. Phil McGraw, of the Dr. Phil show, had some of his staffers bail out one of the attackers, Mercades Nichols from jail.  The teens all had their bail set between $30,000 and $37,000.  The Dr. Phil show later decided that they would not go through with the show that Nichols was supposed to be a guest on due to the shows guidelines being compromised.

There is a general sense of outrage directed towards the attackers online and in the media.  But some are blaming the Internet for all of this violence because it was manufactured online (Myspace comments) and intended for online use (the YouTube video).  One former bully, Rob Havilland, 32 stated that, “yeah, if we could have showed our beat-downs online then I’m sure that there’d be a lot more of em’ and I’d probably be in jail still.”

So what can parents to do ensure that their kids aren’t the victims of bullies or that they aren’t the ones doing the bullying?  According to the director of Safe and Drug Free Schools for the Cadillac, Michigan Area Public School District, Danette Crozier MSW, “the only way that parents can be sure is to snoop.  I had one mom come in who has an older student and she told me that she goes through his Myspace and AIM accounts at least once a week.  Privacy is earned.”  Crozier runs a program called Second Step, it’s an anti-bullying program that has had a great deal of success in her school district and she’s hoping that other schools will implement the same style programs to make sure that violence and harassment aren’t a normal part of any childs school day.

I’m kind of a big deal, on YouTube

      People are rushing out like lemmings to see who can do the craziest/deadliest stunt to capture the title of flavor of the week on YouTube.  The instant celebrity that goes along with people all over the world seeing you in just a few days or weeks is too tempting for some to resist.  Unfortunately teens with freshly minted drivers licenses are taking to the roads with camera phones in attempts to gain the overnight stardom that they’ve seen now quasi-celebrities like Johnny Knoxville and Steve-O from MTV’s hit show Jackass attain.  The latest such effort by a teen to get uploaded could very well end in tragedy.  Two teens were trying to get all four wheels of their car off the ground in Arizona on Wednesday so that they could put footage of it on YouTube.  The driver lost control after the car exceeded 80 mph, both the passenger and driver were injured, the driver is in still in critical condition.

     So where will YouTube go next?  What will be off limits to upload, will they be sued by distraught parents every time a teenager who’s all hopped up on hormones and the zeal of being young gets into an accident trying to get “famous”?  Will YouTube soon be edited for your safety?

The Church of Scientology takes a beating on YouTube

     The Church of Scientology has gobs of celebrity followers from Tom Cruise to Kirstie Alley.  The Church was created by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard in the 50’s and is highly speculative.  The group has been accused of being a cult in the past by many organizations including the Cult Awareness Network, which was subsequently bought by supporters of Scientology in 1996 and no longer considers the organization to be cult like.  How does all of this pertain to YouTube you may wonder.  Well, television star Jason Beghe who has been a strong supporter of Scientology for 14 years just showed up on YouTube denouncing the religion and saying, “Scientology is destructive and it’s a rip off…if Scientology is real then something’s f**ked up.”  Scientology is somewhat of a mystery for many people and to have one of it’s staunchest celebrity supporters speaking out against it publicly is a very new development and insight into the underbelly of the religion.  Although the YouTube segment of Beghe is just a teaser, with all of the buzz surrounding it, there’s sure to be more to come. 

I want a divorce from you(Tube)

     When your divorce isn’t going your way get on YouTube and air your dirty laundry for the world to see.  That may not seem conventional by any means, but that’s what Tricia Walsh Smith has done.  Walsh Smith is the wife of Philip Smith who is the president of the largest theater owner in New York, the Shubert Organization.  In her desperate YouTube rant she says that her husband has no grounds for divorce which would nullify their prenuptial agreement.  She says that in the agreement that she signed she would be entitled to a monthly pension after his death and one of their homes in Florida if the marriage failed and she was not found at fault.  She then proceeds to call his office and ask what she should do with her husbands condoms and Viagra, this is all after she has announced details about their sex life to the film crew in her soon to be former home on Park Avenue.  Will this become the newest trend in divorces, divorce lawyer, Bonnie Rabin told the associated press, “This is absolutely a new step, and I think it’s scary.”  Only time will tell if Walsh Smith is really onto something with the whole idea of publicly attacking her husband online or if the divorce just gets uglier than it already is. 

The Queen of Jordan Uploads for Tolerance

     Stereotypes and misconceptions about Muslims are running rampant lately.  This is in large due to the spotlight cast on the Arab community by international media outlets since the Iraq War began in 2003.  The Queen of Jordan, Queen Rania al-Abdullah is using YouTube to help dispel some of the myths circulating about Muslim life.  The Queen has launched a video on YouTube urging people to send her questions about stereotypes they’ve heard so that she can address them.  The video was launched on March 30^th and in it the Queen says that, “from now until August the 12^th, which is International Youth Day, I hope to be receiving from YouTubers some of the questions that they have and some of the common stereotypes they hear about the Arab world and I’ll try to break them down one by one and address them.”  The Queen is going to be one busy lady from now until August.

YouTube denied in China

            YouTube is in hot water again.  This time the internet giant is facing off against the Chinese government.  The People’s Republic of China has blocked access to the video sharing website because videos of street demonstrations in Lhasa were posted there March 16^th.  According to Reporters Without Borders access to the BBC, CNN and Yahoo News has also been restricted in the area for almost two weeks now. 

            The Chinese government has come under a lot of fire lately for the cultural genocide that has been said to be taking place under their control in Tibet.  The revived interest in Chinas affairs with Tibet is coming at a time when the Chinese government is trying to polish it’s tarnished image for the summer Olympics in Beijing.  After the Chinese government blocked access to the website they also claimed that the Dalai Lama was trying to incite riots to ruin the Olympic games.  What’s next, Nelson Mandella sabotaging the World Cup?

Celebrities and Online Political Snooping for Dummies

            Hollywoood’s big guns have been throwing their weight around the Internet lately in a show of support for their respective political candidates for the 2008 election year.  There has been an influx of YouTube ads featuring popular musicians, actors and other prominent figures rallying for their candidates.  And with all this buzz surrounding Hollywoods politics, don’t you want to know who’s putting their money where their mouth is?  Thanks to the good people at newsmeat.com, you can now easily scan through a list of your favorite and not so favorite celebrities and find out who’s giving money to which party.  Yet another fantastic way the internet has further enabled the world to snoop on celebs!

Your local paper or an international media menagerie

            Ever wonder how YouTube stacks up against other media outlets?  What about how it compares to the soon to be forgotten granddaddy of all news distribution, newspapers.  Today’s most viewed video on YouTube is the trailer from the new movie 21.  That trailer has been viewed today by 575,149 people.  That’s almost triple the number of people who read the local newspaper in Las Vegas today, with that number hovering at around 205,000 on it’s best day according to the audit bureau of circulations.  The amount of people who clicked on the 21 trailer today is about the same amount of people who will be reading the Star Tribune this Sunday in Minneapolis, Minn.  And that’s just one video on the site, with millions of videos to choose from the number of people on YouTube in a given day is well beyond that of any one newspapers circulation  So if you’re ever questioning if sites like YouTube will be delivering daily fresh batches of videos for years to come, you can now stop questioning.  If any medium is on it’s way out, it’d sadly have to be print.