It's five years old tomorrow and has become known as the home of sneezing pandas, piano-playing cats and Lady GaGa videos – but YouTube can be smarter than that. From Dali on a quiz show to Nirvana in a garage, the site hosts many arts gems, writes BRIAN BOYD
FIVE YEARS ago today, Jawed Karim, went to San Diego's zoo on his day off. Outside the elephant enclosure he switched on his camcorder and recording himself saying of the elephants: "These guys have really, really long, um, trunks – and that's cool". The social, cultural and financial import of these 11 words is massive. Karim's work was the first ever video uploaded to YouTube on April 23rd, 2005. The video sharing website – which was set up by Karim and two of his colleagues from his job at PayPal – now boasts one billion views a day and it is estimated that at any given time one in six of the world's population is watching a panda sneeze/a cat playing a piano/a dog skateboarding – or more likely these days: a Lady Gaga video.
If you take a look at the most watched ever videos on YouTube, you will know how easily amused we are: glossy yet derivative pop music videos, babies laughing (a lot of babies laughing), cats playing the piano, people falling over and surreal confessional monologues.
But the figures for most watched videos don’t tell the full story. Now lodged firmly in the mainstream, the site is also a major repository of educational, cultural and artistic gems. With ten hours of new video uploaded to the site every single second and over 100 million videos watched every day, more and more information is being viewed, processed and recommended. The arts – in their myriad forms – have never been more immediately accessible.
While no major artistic figure (popular music aside) has yet had a YouTube breakthrough moment, it is still early days for the site and within the cultural realm, viewing habits suggest that people are still playing catch-up with landmark cultural events which we all thought were erased from VHS tapes years ago.
Search a bit deeper than today's "Most Featured" videos, and you can track down some fascinating footage: Joy Divison's first TV appearance, Sylvia Plath reading her poetry, James Dean's screen test for East Of Eden, Marlon Brando's screentest for Rebel Without A Cause, a remarkable rendition of Strange Fruitby Billie Holiday, and The Marx Brothers doing their famous "Hat" routine. And where else can you wallow in hours of the best, most under-rated radio show ever – Chris Morris's Blue Jam.
There are dozens of dedicated channels on YouTube focused on the elastic term of culture. Nicknamed "Intelligent You Tube", the ForaTV channel features "videos on the people, issues and ideas changing the world". It's currently featuring an interesting talk by Amy Goodman of the Democracy Now! Organisation in which she argues that "the audience for celebrity journalism is dwindling in America since the US government failed to find WMDs in Iraq". Over at the Open Culture channel they take a jauntier approach: they have the clip of Salvador Dali appearing on the TV show What's My Lineand the whole of The Sopranosseries condensed into nine minutes.
At TED Talks you’ll find a stunning array of talks collected from the annual TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference. Speakers here include Bill Gates and Bill Clinton, but there’s better stuff away from the big names as they show us the bleeding edge of the cutting edge of culture and where it’s going.
Literature isn’t really suited to the YouTube medium – there are numerous clips of authors reading from their famous works and some of the extended interviews with the writers are a delight but you’re always at a one-step remove from the core activity.
With film you have the old and new. The former comes courtesy of the British Film Institute National Archive which boasts “the world’s largest and most diverse TV and film archive” while the latter is showcased on the “YouTube Screening Room” which features high quality new independent films (two new films added every week).
Some stand-alone cultural entities have set up their own channels. One of the first Irish ones to do so was the Model Art Centre in Sligo (home of the Niland Collection) which features preview clips and interviews.
Because YouTube is user-generated many of the videos mentioned above are in breach of copyright laws. This is a running sore for the site as it has to swiftly remove any videos which the copyright holders complain about. However with the site doing more and more deals with various partners, this should lessen over time. Sometimes, though, the copyright issue throws up weird anomalies. A clip from the German film Downfallwhich showed Hitler's last days in his Berlin bunker became a viral sensation when different users replaced the original subtitles with their own satirical versions. The film's director was supportive of the many parodies and it was pointed out that these videos were giving a massive amount of publicity to the film but still Downfall's copyright holder, Constantin Films, has requested YouTube to remove all the parodies.
How cultural content will fare on YouTube over the next five years is largely unknown. When Google bought the site for $1.65 billion in 2006 they probably didn’t realise that four years on YouTube still wouldn’t be turning a profit. There is advertising revenue there but the simple fact is that studies show that the average person spends only 10-15 minutes a day on YouTube, compared to five hours for TV viewing.
YouTube’s next big leap will be on to our television sets. All new televisions now come connected to the internet and most already have YouTube loaded on them. And the global television advertising market is believed to be in the region of €100 billion.
Over its five years, YouTube has been signing up important media partners with one eye on their eventual transition to our TV sets – not just the major record company labels but also Sony Pictures and Walt Disney and the CBS network as well as integrating itself into Sony Bravia TV and TiVo. Last year, in a first for the site, they hosted a live stream of a U2 concert. YouTube is poised to become a media monolith.
The renowned cultural anthropologist, Michael Wesch (dubbed "the explainer" by Wiredmagazine) spent a few years studying remote indigenous cultures in Papua New Guinea before finding richer pickings in studying the effects of social media on society. In a lengthy lecture on the site, titled An Anthropological Introduction To YouTube,he speaks of the site's "Cultural Inversion" – in an increasingly individualistic society the notion of "community" is in decline, so new technological networks and communities are emerging to fill the void: we're individualised like never before but we're also "networked" like never before.
10 ARTS GEMS (Click on headings to see videos)
[ Jeremy Paxman talks Stuckism and Turner Prizes Opens in new window ]
[ Richie Havens’s version of Here Comes The Sun Opens in new window ]
[ Dave Allen on religion and his first day of schoolOpens in new window ]
[ Nirvana play in Chris Novoselic's house Opens in new window ]
[ Marlon Brando’s screentest for Rebel Without a CauseOpens in new window ]
[ The original Lumiere short films Opens in new window ]
[ Surrealist artist Salvador Dali on What’s My Line Opens in new window ]
[ Documentary about The Liberties by Irish film company Opens in new window ]
[ A captivating glide through 500 years of women in art Opens in new window ]
[ Brendan Behan on a Canadian TV panel show Opens in new window ]
FIVE CHANNELS WORTH FOLLOWING
1. TEDTalksFrom the annual TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference, these talks are the cutting edge of our culture. Unmissable.
2. ABC DocumentariesAcclaimed work from the Australian TV channel.
3. Culture CatchFeaturing interviews with leading lights from film, theatre, music and literature.
4. The YouTube Screening RoomHigh quality independent films
5. Explore.OrgShowcasing the work of non-profit groups internationally.
See our selection and suggest your own at Fiona McCann’s blog
