YouTube, You To Be, To Be You, You Be Too. (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog)
Jay Leno and Videos he found on YouTube. About 3 minutes. The first clip looks like a scene from America’s Funniest Home Videos — nothing new there. Two of them are just clever video tricks, and while they’re nicely done, they don’t show us anything that TV hasn’t shown us before. “The Easter Bunny Hates You,” is a hilarious spoof of action movies, but once again, it spoofs the kind of thing that TV has been showing us for decades. Is this really what YouTube is about? This is the selection that Jay Leno chose because he thought it would entertain his home viewers. Views: 375,060.
If you’ve got about 10 minutes, take a look at YOUTUBERS, a video response to the Leno clip. I watched it while gnawing on my PowerBar at my desk. It’s poignant, sweet, cringe-worthy, unintelligible, and touching. Views: 2,739.
When displayed on the huge flatscreen TV on Leno’s set, the YouTube clips look amateurish, and they only serve to set up Leno’s jokes.
But seeing a compilation of YouTubers talking about YouTubing gives a much better sense of YouTube’s cultural power. Yes, it’s narcissism, poorly lit and sometimes inaudible. But it feels much more like reality than “reality TV” ever will.