Generation YouTube: Taking Back Our Culture

Yes, the internet can be incredibly inane, but at least it’s our inanity.

My esteemed colleague Tim Blackmore recently wrote an article for The Mark entitled “The Internet Slowdown,” in which he bemoans the lackluster quality of entertainment on the electronic frontier. YouTube's endless parade of fan music videos, which combine the emotional depth of a hormone-drenched 16-year-old with images of teenage vampires in love, all set to the soul-destroying sound of Taylor Swift, offers compelling, if not incontrovertible, proof of Professor Blackmore's thesis.

Yes, the internet can be painfully dull and inane. I have no argument with this observation, especially since, over the past twenty years, I myself have been responsible for some of the net's smellier digital trash. A quick perusal of Facebook also confirms Blackmore's observation that the net has allowed us to make ourselves the star of the show, and the show we call “me” can indeed be embarrassingly boring.

Often, the truth of the matter is that you suck, I suck, we all suck. Ironically, this ubiquitous judgment often emanates from the very same semi-literate teenagers who watch television dramas featuring horny teenage vampires and listen to mainstream pop music (which, arguably, truly sucks).

But there is more to be said about our growing engagement with amateur digital culture than “you suck.”

Almost exactly one hundred years ago, a growing collection of electronic mass media swept across the globe. Newspapers, radio, magazines, novels, comics, films, and television inundated the cultural landscape and left the elite and their intellectual watchdogs crying foul. “Capitalism's mass culture was delaying the onward march of history towards a better socialist future,” said the Marxists. “Commercial culture corrupts the mind,” liberals and conservatives alike warned. Not to be outdone by the secularist crowd, the clergy joined in on the moral hysteria and wailed, “Popular culture will destroy the soul!”

While each perspective held a grain or more of truth, modernity was not to be denied, and a century later, five major media and entertainment corporations have our collective culture by the short and curlies. Just about every aspect of the rapidly receding 20th century is, in one way or another, connected to a value system that was manufactured, packaged, and sold to billions of consumers by the cultural industry.

Aside from the 100 million dead from the mechanization of warfare, the biocide on which we are all teetering, and the economic and political corruption that defeats our every attempt to arrive at any reasonable solution, one of the largest social facts that we have inherited from the golden age of capitalism is that our culture is not our own. It is private property and we are repeatedly told to keep our thieving digital hands off it.

The privatization of culture is an unfortunate state of affairs. Culture is the architect of collective values that determine what type of society we live in. But our culture has been taken away from us, relabeled as private property, and sold back to the masses.

Returning to Professor Blackmore's complaint, it is undeniable that a great amount of what we do as individuals on the internet sucks mightily. Nonetheless, there remains the simple truth that YouTube, the blogosphere, and many other placeless spaces of the internet contain exquisite entertainment and stimulating brain candy – digital cultural production of the highest order made by mere amateurs. This claim I will not defend, as that would inevitably land us in an intractable argument over tastes and temperaments. Let us instead focus on the irony of finally discovering a way out of the monopolistic grip of capitalism's cultural machinery, only to find ourselves screaming “you suck” at one another.

Even as it frees hundreds of thousands of misguided jackasses to self-destruct in the name of page views, the internet also transforms the mass audience from the relatively passive position of couch potatoes into the hyper-active position of digital content creators. This has the media and entertainment industry running scared, and for good reason. Generation YouTube may not be ready to walk down the red carpet as we yell, “Who are you wearing?” but they are learning to create, and we are eager to watch. We all like to watch.