YouTube, MySpace - It Takes A Web 2.0 Village
Friday, March 2nd, 2007On March 2, 2007, I watched ABC’s Good Morning America and specifically a segment between Diane Sawyer and Juju Chang, correspondent for 20/20, another ABC “news” show. They talked about dangerous videos posted on YouTube and its posting policies and guidelines. YouTube prohibits posting offensive or dangerous videos. The company asks community members to flag videos that don’t follow these guidelines so YouTube can review and potentially remove these videos. GMA focused on the video trend of running into fences. Cheap thrills!
Sawyer and Chang criticized YouTube for not self-policing its content and for instead leaving this function up to the public. In other words, the community could not be trusted with the responsibility of helping to block videos that might compel teens to do stupid and dangerous acts just to get their “15 megabytes of fame.”
I’m going to be honest and tell you I’m a fan of GMA. I genuinely enjoy watching Diane Sawyer and the GMA team and generally find them to be entertaining and at least relatively balanced. But on this occasion, Sawyer and Chang’s position was problematic on so many levels. First, how hypocritical! As a press organization, ABC News, which owns and operates GMA and 20/20, presumably supports free speech. Apparently this civil liberty doesn’t extend to the younger members of our society. Moreover, ABC thinks little about promoting responsibility and accountability, and certainly doesn’t hesitate to televise the same “dangerous” YouTube videos to puff up ratings for GMA and to plug its “in-depth coverage of this ‘news’ story” on 20/20.
Sawyer and Chang were wrong to criticize YouTube. YouTube’s policy of having its members flag dangerous or offensive videos is a far more democratic way to balance free speech and community safety. It puts the responsibility on the consumers and the video posters where it belongs.
A better alternative during GMA’s coverage would have been for Sawyer and Chang to criticize the kids themselves and their inane willingness to risk hurting themselves for a little YouTube fame. As a society, we continue to shift responsibility away from the person doing the act — especially when it’s a young person — whether the act is posting the video or consuming it. We ignore that young kids aren’t mindless. They make judgment calls and sometimes they use poor judgment. Why not point that out? Why not hold them accountable? Nothing makes kids more self-conscious than looking stupid; and frankly, watching a teenage boy hurl himself towards a fence and catch a board in his crotch looks really stupid — and painful. Yeah, real cool, dude.
YouTube, MySpace and other web 2.0 communities continually urge their members to flag questionable content. That’s an excellent way for communities to operate. It parses out the responsibility of maintaining a healthy community to all the individual members. No one person, and certainly no corporation, can be expected or trusted to maintain a community standard. That’s not democratic, feasible or socially responsible. At some point consumers, even young ones, have to decide not to consume garbage.
Part of being a member of a democratic society and a web 2.0 community is acknowledging that it really does take a village. But don’t expect media conglomerates to stop showing this garbage when it suits them. Showing these videos on network television under the guise of criticizing YouTube and the kids in the videos is hypocritical and socially irresponsible. It extends the audience for the videos just to garner better ratings for ABC, no matter how much Sawyer and Chang criticize those dumb kids for their dumb stunts. After all, you don’t really think the kids in the videos called up their friends after watching these ABC reports and said, “Boy am I embarrassed.” More likely they called everyone they knew and said, “Dude, I’m on national television!”
