Arbitrary? Hardly.

How does Youtube (or other online social networking/collaborative platforms) compare to public access TV or other community media projects we've looked at? Use the example of Youtube and at least two other examples from the links below to anchor your response to this question. Bonus question: Who benefits and who is in control?

There are a variety of differences and similarities between public access TV (and things like it) and Web 2.0. While both provide an outlet for information, creativity, and knowledge to flow between individuals, the discrepencies that exist between the mediums are glaring.

First off, Youtube was bought by Google for more than the entire national public access TV budget. Assuming Google was reasonable in their expectations of Youtube, they did this because Youtube was a viable source of revenue. Why? Audience. Youtube attracts a wide variety of people-- bored students, amateur pundits, people showcasing their houses-- in a simpler and more efficient way than Public Access ever did. Also, people love to see themselves, and Youtube allows for a program/video to be pulled up on command. No waiting, no missing a part of the program. This means that it's sheerly more convenient for people to use. When the Everything is Miscellaneous reading talks about "tagging leaves," the same principle applies. At your convenience, whenever you want, you just pull up things of interest. It's less laborious to type in 12 letters than to retrieve a book and flip through the pages.

Part of this inherently is due to the increase in technology and the Internet, but part of it is also that using the camera built into your laptop to send a video through your laptop to watch on Youtube via your laptop is easier than what public access initially required. The "Metacrap" article also hits on this point, talking about the ease with which people do things, but the lax behavior exhibited when they fail to make it easy for anyone else to decipher (i.e. UNTITLED.DOC).

The article titled "User-Generated Censorship" provides insight to the negative side of this. It's also much easier to make a poor comment on a Youtube video or flag someone's blog than it is to call and complain to your local public access station. Also, I would argue that most of what it on Youtube, in the blogosphere, on Urban Dictionary or Wikipedia, or through other expressions on the internet caters to niche markets and a fair proportion of people on the Internet simply do not care. That is why some videos have 3 views and some have 3 million-- it's not that big of a deal. One would argue that public access TV also caters to niche markets. I would not disagree with this, but your market through TV expands only through your metropolis, so your niche is incredibly small, which goes back to the issue of audience. The niche on Youtube is the aggregate of the same niche across all of the geographic areas, which makes it incredibly large relative to public access TV, even for specific ideas.

So who is in control? The user. You control what you watch and pay attention to, what you search for and what you contribute. Who benefits? Everyone. You have an outlet, regardless of how miscellaneous or arbitrary your contribution seems to others, and your audience may just gain some insight in the process.