Reflections on "Youtube and You" by Mike Wesch

When reading this article, at first I thought of the growing individualism that the Internet age was caused. I always saw Facebook, vlogging, and the ever-growing presence of Youtube as just a growing sense of individualism and in some cases narsicism. While I gave second thought to these ideas after Wesch's demonstrations and explanations of how some people are severely touched by many Youtube videos, I realized these are usually just heat of the moment emotions. The viewers probably tell a few friends about the video, but they forget about it after a few days. It reminds me of passengers on an airplane. You may get to know them and hear some interesting stories, but ultimately you will probably never see them again. They are what Tyler Durden (Edward Norton) calls them on the movie Fight Club - single-serving friends.

In many ways we are becoming a single-serving society, in which we have much more at our disposal, but we are getting further from the collective identity that the country was founded on. With a mutitude of mediums to spread our message anonymously and the mass of information on the Internet, we can learn nearly all we need to know through the web and feel like we can connect to people through the interwebs as well.

Who knows where this will go next, though. Just as Prof. Wesch states in the article, more research is needed to really discover that answer - if it still is intact by the time that research is completed.