YouTube is not without criticism. It relies on its users to highlight videos or content that can be arguably pornographic, that contains copyrighted or trademarked property owned by others, or otherwise contains questionable content that might be deemed defamatory or a breach of YouTube’s terms of service that all who upload must agree to.
Clean Cut Media, a website studying the influences of media and pop culture, states that YouTube is the fourth largest destination on the Internet, and the largest video-sharing site. It has 300 million worldwide visitors per month allowing in excess of 5 billion video streams per month. Every day, close to 3.5 million people visit YouTube. The number of videos posted on YouTube in 2008 was estimated to be 83.4 million, and some sources believe the number to be closer to 150 million in 2010.
The market research company, comScore, states the obvious when it claims that YouTube is the “dominant provider of online video” in the United States. More than 14 billion videos were viewed in May 2010, and 24 hours of new videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute.
YouTube has created its own celebrity culture whereby so-called “ordinary people” become famous for no other reason than having appeared on YouTube. Or, because they shot a YouTube video that becomes popular and goes viral. For example, Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager, Amber Lee Ettinger also known as Obama Girl, Chris Crocker for his sobbing rant: “Leave Britney Alone,” and “Bree” for LonelyGirl15 (a fictional story of teenage girl and the video diary of her life).
YouTube also has an interesting business model, at least for the “pirated” clips you can see on YouTube if you look for them. Pirated clips of movies, TV shows, and other copyrighted productions posted by third parties that you’d think would be pulled off of YouTube by the legal departments of Paramount, 20th Century Fox, or other copyright owners, are often allowed to remain on YouTube as long as YouTube and the copyright holder split the ad revenue generated from the page the clips are on!
Business, nonprofits, “traditional” media, politicians, and interest groups of all types have taken advantage of YouTube’s ability to get video messages to individuals without paying for distribution; in a way, democratizing the “airwaves” in a way television cannot.
Whether you like it or not, YouPorn (the pornographic website modeled on YouTube but which is in no way related to YouTube), is the largest free pornographic site in the world and has been ranked among the top 50 most accessed websites in the world.
3. Cell Phones and Texting
The very first mobile telephones were put into New York City police cars in 1924, although cell phones or mobile phones didn’t become prevalent until the early 1990s (when some of them looked like, and were as heavy as, bricks). The adoption of this technology has been astounding and transformative, especially in the developing world; in some areas in Asia and Africa, the finance and development of land lines has taken a backseat to the adoption of mobile telephone infrastructure.
By the end of 2009, there were an estimated 4.6 billion mobile phones in use throughout the world. China has a staggering 786,000,000 mobile phone subscribers. India has more than 600,000,000 mobile phone subscribers and the United States has more than 285,000,000. Even less developed countries such as Pakistan (97,000,000 subscribers) and Nigeria (64,000,000 subscribers) have large and growing mobile phone markets.
Most cell phones manufactured since 2005 have the ability to use Short Message Service (SMS) or text message if the subscriber pays for it. Although anyone older than 50 might find the idea of texting with one’s cell phone ridiculous when one could just as easily phone the person directly, texting short messages is often used when it’s inconvenient or impractical to have a telephone conversation, such as during a meeting, when the surrounding noise (or company) makes a telephone conversation problematic, or if you’re a student, while in class. If you’re a parent and your kids don’t pick up their cell phones or check their voice mail, rest assured the kids will certainly check their text messages. Remember, you’re more likely to reach them with a text these days than a phone call.
Of all mobile or cell phones, 75 percent have text capabilities. SMS text messaging, where the sender is limited to 140 (or 160) characters, may well be the most utilized text data application in the world today, even more prevalent than email given its widespread usage in China, India, and other parts of Asia. In China, it’s estimated that 700 billion text messages were sent in 2007. In the Philippines, more than 400 million text messages a day are sent (142 billion text messages a year). Text messaging is so prevalent in India, that service providers text transit alerts, cricket scores, and allow for mobile billing and banking services to be performed via text messaging. Over the years, text messaging has expanded to include digital images, sounds, and video sent via Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS).
There have been unfortunate social side effects of the use of texting on mobile phones. Driving while texting is one obvious example and many jurisdictions have banned all use of mobile devices while driving given that automobile accidents are more likely to happen when the driver is texting a message and not watching the road (duh). Another is the misuse of language that has evolved through the use of texting shorthand (e.g., lol, 2day, lmao, b4, gr8); changing English and other languages (e.g., in China, the numbers 520 sound like the Mandarin words for “I love you”).
Perhaps the worst social side effect from texting, and one that relates to reputation management, involves “sexting,” where teenagers try to impress (or entice) each other by sending either sexual content within a text message, or sexual images they have taken of themselves with their cell phones. What’s worse is when these private communications are re-sent to others; the sender (often being a teenage boy who received the “sext”) is potentially in possession of child pornography and subject to criminal prosecution. If re-texted to others, these sexts could well lead to convictions for distribution of child pornography. (Sexting is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 7.)
We can’t forget golfer Tiger Woods’ exploits (discussed in Chapter 3), that were exposed after his wife Elin found sexually charged text messages on Tiger’s cell phone. A few of Tiger’s girlfriends actually kept these text messages, eventually publishing them on websites and releasing them to the media. (Texts aren’t private, Tiger!)
4. Twitter
According to Twitter’s website: “Twitter is a real-time information network powered by people all around the world that lets you share and discover what’s happening now.” Twitter enables users to send and read other users’ messages (called “tweets”), which are text-based posts of no more than 140 characters to a mass audience of “followers.” Tweets are visible publicly, as is the very intention of Twitter. Users may subscribe to other authors’ tweets.
San Antonio-based market research firm Pear Analytics analyzed 2,000 tweets which were sent in English from the United States over a two-week period in August 2009 and categorized the tweets as the following:
• Pointless babble (what one might also call “small talk”): 40.55 percent
• Conversational: 37.55 percent
• Pass-along value: 8.7 percent
• Self-promotion: 5.85 percent
• Spam: 3.75 percent
• News: 3.6 percent
There were more than 100 million registered Twitter users as of May, 2010. The US Library of Congress stated that it will be acquiring, and permanently storing the entire archive of public Twitter posts since 2006.
5. Social Media Is Here to Stay
Digital communications are here to stay, and communication through social media will only get more prevalent until something else supplants it. Online forums, blogs, and social networking sites such as Facebook have revolutionized the way people communicate with each other and share their