On several occasions in class the question “what is the most viewed YouTube video of all time?” has come up. And of course the answer remains Justin Bieber – Baby ft. Ludacris with 791,636,474 views. This is number is astonishing and more than 100,000,000 views ahead of second place. The YouTube community has spent a combined total of 5,644 years watching some dude say “baby” and dance around a bowling alley. (Okay, I’ll admit to watching it for the purposes of this post.) But the insanity doesn’t stop there. The next four most viewed videos are all also music videos to pop songs. When all of these views are added up, users of YouTube have spent a combined total of 17,721 years watching these five videos.
What does this say about our values as a society?
The fact that this type of content is by far the most popular on YouTube is appalling. The statement we have made as a society by consuming this material is loud and clear. These videos do not feature the arts, science or philosophy. Nor do they promote education, communication, or literature. In fact these videos, as well as others like them, are devoid of intellectual value. They contain messages that advocate self-indulgence and the pursuit of immediate personal pleasures. This does not reflect well on us as a society, and we should be more aware of the ideals we are promoting through our consumption of this type of material. As Albert Einstein famously stated:
“Well-being and happiness never appeared to me as an absolute aim. I am even inclined to compare such moral aims to the ambitions of a pig.”
I don’t think that the top viewed videos reflect anything about about our society. Not all people go on Youtube to watch educational videos. After all, the purpose of Youtube and video sharing is not for educational purposes, but for entertainment. When I go on Youtube (which I admit is quite often), I may be looking for something educational, but mostly I’m looking for something to keep me entertained in my free time. Also, the majority of Youtube users are young users, as the website was created in our generation. I think we can agree that users our age and younger are not always interested in learning and education is not always on our minds. The number of views on a Youtube video simply represents popularity. When we want to be entertained, we look at what’s popular in entertainment, which, unfortunately, may be a Justin Bieber video.
I’m going to agree with easterdt’s post. You Tube was created mostly for entertainment purposes, and while there are educational videos on it, most peole use youtube to watch entertainment videos, especially music videos. I think I see what you are getting at though. Maybe we are spending too much time on youtube watching videos that pop stars made and not enough time watching the news, and learning about important issues around us, and studying those important things like the arts, science, and philosophy.
Well, I think that it does reflect on our society, becasuse, we all use the medium of youtube for about the same thing, to watch dumb stuff, even in class people were asking about if Dr. Faris had seen Gundam style, and insisting we watch it…This is a dark thing…no the videos do not promote literature, arts, science, if anything the material it shows us is a mockery of the subjects it captures, the videos about books are usually cartoons that mock the dumbness of our own creative process, and the sciences cover the ‘mad science’ of the 1870’s which elicit shock, disgust or gut bursting laughter at the ludicrous and outrageous attempts of our own best and brightest (you can watch a video of a rat with a human ear grafted onto it’s back on youtube, just because we CAN). Sure some videos are used for the good of the people, to educate or something, but they are the small minority, in a outrageous majority of humor, satire, and idiocracy…And we can’t ignore this, we need to try to promote the arts in the people of our society, not to encourage the TLDR trolls.
While I also am not a fan of the 5 titles on YouTube’s big hit list, I would like to point out that there are a lot of videos that are put up that are educational and express what I would think of as excellent values for a society.
A quick search for “Flash Cards” shows educational material aimed at all age groups, from children learning how to read and write to adults attempting to learn a foreign language. I see a free and easy way to educate people.
When I go to the YouTube channel for Universities ( http://www.youtube.com/education?category=University) I see what I would traditionally think of as big name schools like MIT, Berkeley, and Harvard. They are reaching out to larger audiences with this new communication style, sending out free courses for higher education via a developing medium.
The Khan Academy, a free service set up by Sal Khan, an educator interested in reaching larger audiences, uses YouTube as their primary educational medium. http://www.khanacademy.org/. They proudly boast on their page “201,679,677 lessons Delivered” at the time of my viewing. This is pretty impressive for an organization that started in 2006 with just one teacher educating his family members on math using YouTube.
So yes, I see how it can be disheartening to look at the numbers on Justin Bieber and bemoan the destruction of society as we know it. But even if it is a million dumb videos to one good one, remember that there are some awesome things going on out there.
I’m not sure that I agree with your argument. I think a lot of this comes from the fact that I think everyone has a different reason for looking up content on YouTube. Some people use YouTube because they want a video that will teach them how to do something. Others use it because they want to see a video that will entertain them. Thus, I think that these statistics simply show that people value YouTube as a mean of entertainment more than a mean of education.
Also, I think that these statistics make sense. I think it’s much more common for someone to replay a music video than an educational video. As soon as someone has heard all of the information in an educational video once, they probably won’t want to watch it again. Sure, they might play it again if they don’t understand something. However, they wouldn’t play it many more times. On the other hand, if someone enjoys a music video or even just the song, it’s very possible that they would play this video numerous times. As a result, the number of views for music videos would be much greater than that of educational videos.