Back in April of this year, YouTube announced it had reached a milestone: viewers were watching more than 100 million videos per day on the site. Then, in July, Yahoo News reported that the “big four” television networks suffered the lowest weekly ratings ever. And on Monday afternoon, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. Since its inception, YouTube has stated that it was more important for the company to build a community than to make a lot of money. And that is precisely the reason the sale of YouTube made its founders billionaires.
According to Rev2, three former PayPal employees, who, witnessing the boom of online grassroots video, realized the need for a service that made the process of uploading, watching and sharing videos hassle-free, founded YouTube. They registered the domain YouTube.com on February 15th, 2005 and developed the site over the following months from a garage in Menlo Park. In May 2005 they launched in a public beta, and in November, YouTube made its debut with $3.5 million of funding from Sequoia Capital.
Perhaps the popularity of YouTube lies in its self-explanatory name: proposing a convergence of “You” and “Television,” manifesting an online world as a vast community. But this is not the first online space manufactured as a community. MySpace, a site that started out as a “place for friends” has grown into the definitive social-networking phenomenon. The site hosts tens of millions of pages, with new users signing up every day in the hundreds of thousands. In October of last year, an industry poll claimed that MySpace had 12 billion unique page views, twice that of Google’s 6.6 billion. No wonder Rupert Murdoch bought the brand for $650 million in cash. Even ebay founder Pierre Omidyar said he started the site with its unique structure because “I believe in community, and bringing back community, because we’ve lost it a little bit in the modern world.”
At one time, the word community signified a kind of neighborhood, wherein those that inhabited this specific locality shared more than just a zip code. They had a series of commonalities that often included demographics, psychographics, cultural interests and physical companionship. It seems odd to refer to a website that virtually hosts millions of strangers a “community,” but frankly, there is no other description that fits this phenomenon more appropriately. What is not odd is the popularity of these “communities” and why humans need these communities in their lives so desperately.
Despite the striking dominance of the modern brain, civilized men and women are driven by the functions of our primitive brain, especially to tribalism and the need to be close to one another. In fact, human beings are very much like dogs in this manner: we are pack animals that thrive on companionship. From a scientific perspective, the need for our brains to connect with others comes from what is now considered “attachment theory” — a theory, or a group of theories, about the tendency to seek closeness to another person, to feel secure when that person is present, and to feel anxious when that person is absent. The origin of attachment theory can be traced to the publication of two 1958 papers: John Bowlby’s “The Nature of the Child’s Tie to his Mother,” in which precursory concepts of “attachment” were introduced, and Harry Harlow’s “The Nature of Love,” which was based on the results of experiments which showed that infant monkeys preferred emotional attachment over food. When babies have no “relationship” they fail to thrive, in fact, they often die. And the worst punishment we can inflict on a person is to keep them in solitary confinement.
This need for human attachment comes from the limbic part of the brain, which seats all of our emotions and our basic needs. Interestingly, the word limbic derives it’s name from the Latin word for ‘ring’ or ‘circle.” Further, mammals are “open” systems. We cannot exist without referencing other people. When in the company of family members, lovers and friends, our limbic brains resonate with theirs. This communication stabilizes us, and improves emotional well-being and health. It seems that the limbic brain needs to be in active relationship with others to be happy. Humans, quite simply, are deeply social creatures.
Yet, according to American Demographics, during the 1990s the number of people who live alone increased by 4.6 million to reach 27 million — a 21% increase. One-person households have had far higher growth rates and are now more numerous than married couples with kids. At least 1 in every 3 new households created during the 1990s was a single person. As a result, they are now 26 percent of U.S. households — more than 1 in every 4 — up from less than 1 in every 10 — in 1950. Further, according to the U.S. census, one third of all school age children in the United States are, for some part of the week, latch key kids—that is, they go home to an empty house or apartment. The total number may be between five and seven million children between five and 13 years old. Marian Wright Edelman, the director of the Children’s Defense Fund , thinks it’s close to 16 million children. The Census Bureau found that 15% were home alone before school, 76% after school and 9% at night. Presumably, the 9% have parents who work night shifts. One-half of all children in the country age 12 to 14 are home alone an average of seven hours a week.
While people might be able to intellectually rationalize this behavior as necessary, our limbic brains have not yet become adept at accepting this. Because we humans are also quite clever, we find alternative communities wherever and whenever we can. Thus, the popularity of brands and websites providing community, companionship, a sense of belonging and like-minded mutuality.
However, while these sites may involve and leverage innovative technologies, YouTube and MySpace are not fundamentally unique in catering to the basic human need to connect. Humans have been responding to brands like this for years. In the 1950s community was created via Avon, Mary Kay and Tupperware parties, in the 1960s by participating in the Volkswagen movement, in the 1970s by dressing in Levi’s attire. In the 1980s, community became more culturally and linguistically savvy via participation in the MTV and Nike tribes, and in the 1990s it became more experiential via a Starbucks or eBay encounter. Now, in the beginning of the 21st century, you can acquire the traits of community by joining the MySpace and YouTube tribes. What these brands and communities have in common is not their business models or their return on investment prospects for shareholders, or even their level of success in the marketplace. What these communities share is this: they have provided what families and neighborhoods and loved ones once could but no longer do: camaraderie, connectivity, a sense of belonging, all the while allowing participants to be seen and heard and to feel important. Perhaps most profoundly, in a world of rampant insecurity, participation in these sites provides tangible proof of one’s own existence.
This is both a great success and a tragic failure. Our culture is now more technologically connected than it has ever been before, with more dialogue and exchange and communication. It’s just a shame that when visiting the vast community of YouTube, we are connecting with people we will likely never meet, in a place that doesn’t really exist, and in a community that will likely never know your name. At least your real one.
Great article! Supremely well written.
I've been fascinated, for lack of a better term, with the whole myspace movement and WHY exactly it exists--like text messaging and emailing, its yet another way to build a barrier between you and someone else. It's extremely guarded, and as far as community goes, I think myspace and youtube are completely and utterly false. The most powerful form of communication happens face-to-face, whether there's gesturing involved, touching (physical contact says a lot--ranging from I love you, I have perverted thoughts about you, I hate you, I want to protect you, etc), or talking. That's the essence of community. Community allows us to develop, enhance, and create meaning, and if the community is somehow false or vacant then any exchanges within it are...well...false and vacant. Kinda like how they always advise you not to have a relationship with someone you meet while drunk, in a bar.
I heard about a couple, the woman in Illinois, the man in South Korea, who got married recently. Via webcam. YouTube THAT! I'm sure they're very happy, but c'mon. It was a distant second choice to actually having the ceremony together. There's no replacement.
As far as I can tell, myspace through its weird blogging feature among other things, allows people to confirm the reptilian sense that they're the undisputed center of the universe. It's a very celestial thing, with people putting insane amounts of time into their homepage layouts to build their "star" aura, with huge "friends" lists as their orbiting planets. Maybe its more galactic, then. Either way, I'm not really sure what one gets from it in the long run.
In my own experiences I actually re-connected with a few people who had moved to various corners of the country. But then, I had to ask, why did I lose track of them in the FIRST place?
And what do most people want out of myspace, or youtube, or match.com, or whatever the hell else is out there? As addictive as it can be, adding friends and reading blogs and snooping on ex's, there's not much of an end goal in any of those activities. I'm not sure how many people really hang out and have dinners and parties with their myspace friends...because if they were doing those things, what's the fucking point of myspace?
So basically, I don't think any of these sites have replaced any sort of lost community. Just as people are inclined to commune with one another, they're also equally inclined to presume that they're the single most important entity in existence. There's nothing wrong with going through this natural self-absorption--its called "adolescence" and we've all suffered from some narcissistic tendencies even after those years. But it really is one of those things that's kind of a default setting, so you have to work at realizing that you're not the center of everything. Online communities sort of eliminate that, because nothing about them is real and the online world doesn't really confront you with anything that's going to upset your default settings--and if it does, well shit, just click the "X" in the upper left corner and close it.
I've had weird things emailed to me. I've had weird things texted to me. I've received bizarre myspace messages. I know of someone who got a text message from his sort-of girlfriend that she was pregnant.
And why not? The immediacy of actually dealing one-on-one with another human, coping with the various difficulties of daily life, is HARD. The internet has done many things, and one of the biggest is giving us more and more ways to consciously evade reality and replace it with a more personalized, more controllable virtual one.
Somehow, it all fits in with our celebrity obsession and culture of distraction.
Super.
On Oct.11.2006 at 01:20 PM