Apparently, if males ages 18-34 had their way, YouTube would be nothing but videos of people swallowing spoons of cinnamon , skateboarding dogs, or this. There's no denying surfing YouTube can be fun. But that represents just the infancy of YouTube and other video-sharing outlets. Just like the infancy of TV and MySpace/Facebook and blogging, entertainment is the initial draw. It is through entertainment that people become attracted to a medium, and once that medium has proven that it can capture the imagination of an audience, it starts to evolve. And it also starts to attract institutions and corporations. Now whether or not corporate/institutional buy-in evolves a medium or subverts it is a matter of opinion, I suppose. But the fact is that if corporate/institutional users can preserve the philosophy and spirit of the medium in their use of it, a lot of interesting things can happen. (Look at that guy who did an ipod "commercial" for fun and actually had it picked up and used by Apple.)
In fact, YouTube and the technology that makes taking and posting video easy has created a whole new category--edutainment (or infotainment). It is not enough for a video to be strictly educational. A generation is coming of age that is used to quick-cut, sound-bite, multi-task, mutli-platform media. You will lose them if you present dry, long-winded, straightforward material on YouTube or blip.tv. But if you can engage them, you will be able to teach them. So do educational videos stand a chance against entertainment videos? Yes, because they will, if done right, be one and the same. And the "getting hit in the cojones" videos? They're forever.
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2 comments:
Great take on an interesting issue!
Edutainment is definitely the way it's going... I can't see it's a bad thing though, provided the information doesn't lose quality in the process.
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