Recently I had the great fun of making a short video with a friend. As soon as we finished the fifty-nine-second piece, we immediately posted it to Youtube.com. It was so exciting to be making a video because we were capturing a moment of ourselves onto a permanent record. The moments we created on video would not be lost forever like most moments in our lives. However, exciting as it was to make the video, it was all the more exciting posting the video to Youtube.com, a video-sharing website. As the video was uploading to the Youtube website, I felt the anticipation for the uploading to finish welling up in my heart. It is undeniable that for a media uploader, there is something magical about posting media. There is something extremely exciting about interjecting your work, your art, your life, your ideas, and your very self into the World Wide Web. I indeed understand this excitement. I am a media uploader.
There are two wonderful sentiments that come from video uploading. One is the sentiment that the moments you captured on video are now available to watch and rewatch anywhere and anytime in the world. The other sentiment is that once you have uploaded your video, you have made a mark on the world and you matter.
Just as “snail mail” was sucked into the World Wide Web in the form of email, video has been sucked in as well in the form of media posts. Email is great because it is quick, omnipresent, and easy to do (you can email at anytime, any place with just a mouse click!) Video uploads are the same way, and this is why they are also wonderful. Media uploaders essentially are liberated from the physical limitations of DVD's, and people can see others’ works without having to obtain and insert a circular, shiny disk into their computers. The only way to enjoy video is by having it be seen. With video uploading, these records are given an honest chance to be seen and reseen all the time. Video posts will never not have a chance to be seen by someone; they will always have a chance to become meaningful to someone as long as the posts are not taken down.
When the upload of a video completes, another magical thing happens – the media uploader puts a mark on the world. He creates a unique URL address that is distinctly his own. For the video I made with my friend, the URL address http://youtube.com/watch?v=UhFF82Rx4lE is the link to our video. This address is significant because it can be easily copied and pasted into different people’s web browsers and viewed over and over. Whoever receives this link will be exposed to our video, and for those fifty-nine seconds that they open the link, they are focusing on what we wanted them to see. I feel somewhat powerful. Besides having an address in the World Wide Web, what makes our video even more accessible to the world is the fact Youtube.com allows our work to be tagged, searched, and categorized. Anybody who clicks on the tags associated with our video will have a chance to see it as well. If someone clicks on the tags “jonjon,” “acf,” “lab,” or “mit,” they will find a list of videos to choose from, and my video will be on that list. Also, if someone searches for videos using the keywords “lab” or “jonjon,” our video will be a search result. Finally, if a browser looks for videos under the categories “Science and Technology,” he will also stumble across our video. This makes me feel really important! If someone clicks around on Youtube.com in just the right way, I might be able to engage him for fifty-nine seconds. Not only that, I will also know when someone has viewed our video because Youtube keeps count of the number of times videos are viewed.
It is really exciting knowing that there is a possibility that my friend and I might engage and influence someone with the fifty-nine seconds our video is playing. This is a fifty-nine seconds of power we would have never had the chance to own before the media-uploading age. We might make someone’s day happy; we might change around someone’s boring day at lab; we might inspire another video to be made; we might change someone’s opinions; we might get someone to think Science is cool. Although these are just “we might” statements, I am optimistic enough to think that our video is actually powerful. I actually do feel important.
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