Culture

Culture

by Mike Masnick




Tracing YouTube's Ancestry Back To America's Funniest Home Videos

from the the-web-2.0-family-tree dept

The tech world is pretty fast paced, with people looking forward all the time and rarely looking back. That's unfortunate sometimes as there are things to be learned from what happened in the past. Slate has a fun article tracking the cultural history of home videos from the cultural zeitgeist of America's Funniest Home Videos to YouTube today. It mostly focuses on AFHV and what a cultural phenomenon it was when it first aired, while noting the underlying boundary pushing it encouraged, which is now displayed widely on YouTube. While the article trashes YouTube a bit for being "lonelier, less welcoming, and more pathetically voyeuristic," that's only half of the equation. It's also a lot more powerful for both publishers and viewers (and, in some cases, the distinction gets pretty blurry). Of course, that's representative of just about all of the new online-enabled publishing platforms these days. The signal-to-noise may be lower, but the absolute signal is much, much higher and much, much more compelling.

6 Comments | Leave a Comment..

 
 

Reader Comments

(Flattened / Threaded)

Add Your Comment

Have a Techdirt Account? Sign in now.
Get Techdirt’s Daily Email
Plain Text HTML
Save me a cookie
  • Plain Text: A CRLF will be replaced by break <br> tag, all other allowable HTML is intact
  • HTML: No formatting of any kind is done without explicitly being written in
  • Allowed HTML Tags: <b> <i> <p> <a> <em> <br> <strong> <blockquote> <hr> <tt>
Close
Have a Techdirt Account? Sign in now.
Get Techdirt’s Daily Email
Plain Text HTML Save me a cookie

Search Techdirt
And now, a word from our Sponsors..



Subscribe to Techdirt's Daily Email Newsletter

Techdirt's Daily Email Newsletter

Related Stories
Close
E-mail It