YT Critiques – Irish Football Fans Fix a Car

Once again I feel compelled to state that YouTube is definitely not television. To further the notion consider this video featuring Irish football fans and a car with a dented roof. It’s short, simple and pointless to a degree, and yet it adequately captures the depths to which YouTube content can be so serendipitous and voyeuristic. These qualities offer a new paradigm in modern culture. Video content is no longer the domain of those who partake in extensive planning and staging. Video can now exist on the basis of unforeseen whims by those who have a mobile device on hand. Of course such amateurism is clearly present in this video by the lack of any narration, backstory, or context. And that’s to say nothing about the shoddy camera work seen in the early portion of the clip, as unidentified persons stick cash notes inside a car door as a gesture of goodwill towards its owner.

But then something strange happens. As the camera slowly pans to get a different perspective, a quasi-rhythmic pounding is heard in the distance. This is later accompanied by a joyous chant of “For the boys in green, fix the car” as several men starting pounding the roof around the dent. One man is even seen pointing at certain spots to hit as if he were a practitioner of some ancient, esoteric ritual. The video of course ends not long after the boisterous celebration that ensues once the dent is completely popped out. The rousing emotional intensity of this moment does plenty to explain why the video was uploaded, while also suggesting a new reality for our world, one in which few engrossing events, even those of a seemingly trivial significance, can go uncaptured.

YT Critiques – Smack the Pony – Architects

To date I have never considered YouTube as something akin to television. For me YouTube is too chaotic and anarchistic to be seen as analogous to traditional broadcast television. And yet this is what I find most fascinating about the medium; the fact that anyone could post video content about anything onto the platform (well at least confined to YouTube’s content policies, of course). In addition to this YouTube is adorned with some of the Internet’s most recognizable features, like the user comment section and the search box. To me there is a rather subtle revolutionary aspect to the search box that I still feel is largely understated and unappreciated. For embedded within this particular feature is a novel idea; that one has the ability to seek and find the content that they wish to consume. On the Internet one is not merely relegated to consume what is offered to them by the corporate administrators of the medium. The search box allows the Internet to take a modest step away from the latent, idle passivity that TV would demand. Simply put Internet content is meant to be found and discovered in ways that TV content is not.