Clive Thompson on How YouTube Changes the Way We Think

What’s happening to video is like what happened to word processing.
Back in the ’70s and early ’80s, publishing was a rarefied, expert job.
Then Apple’s WYSIWYG interface made it drop-dead easy, enabling an
explosion of weird new forms of micropublishing and zines. Laptop audio
editing did the same thing, giving birth to the mashup and
cut-and-paste subgenres of music. Then there’s photo manipulation, once
a rarefied propaganda technique. Photoshop made it a folk art.

In a sense, you could argue that even after 100 years of moving
pictures, we still don’t know what video is for. The sheer cost of
creating it meant we used it for a stiflingly narrow set of purposes:
news, documentaries, instructional presentations.

Now the lid is blowing off. —Clive Thompson (Wired)