The Beast With a Billion Eyes

By James Poniewozik

In 1991, when a bystander videotaped the police beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles, the incident was almost unbelievable--not the violence but the recording of it. Imagine! That four policemen would pummel a subdued man, and someone would just happen to have a camera! What were the odds?

Do a YouTube search today on the term police brutality, and you get more than 780 videos, from Houston, Hungary, Egypt and beyond. This is just one sign of how much YouTube--and similar video-sharing sites--has changed the flow of information. People have had cameras for decades and Web access for years. It's the combination of two simple things--easy, cheap recording and easy, free distribution--that makes YouTube so potent and its impact so complex. It's not just a new medium; it's several in one.

It's a surveillance system. If you credit YouTube with revolutionizing the media, you must first credit every cell-phone company that has handed out deep-discount videophones like Cracker Jack prizes; they've turned us into a culture of Zapruders. When millions have the power to quickly, easily send any image around the world, you have something akin to global telepathy. (The cell-phone messages from 9/11 victims were chilling enough; imagine the visuals, had the attacks happened in 2006.)

It was a comedy fan's camera phone, for instance, that caught Michael Richards spewing racial slurs at African-American hecklers. Incidents like this are wearing away the distinction between amateur and professional photojournalists. As Clay Shirky of New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program puts it, "It's hard to argue that a paparazzi is more of a photojournalist than the person who takes a picture of the London train bombing and uploads it."

But if YouTube made celebrities and journalists nervous, it was open season on politicians. Montana Senator Conrad Burns became a YouTube star for nodding off in a Senate hearing; Democratic Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, for getting a smooch on the cheek from President George W. Bush. (Burns lost re-election; Lieberman won but only after losing the primary.) Stage-managed politics became reality TV, and veteran pols seemed unsure what had hit them. When you watch Virginia Senator George Allen calling a rival's camera-wielding staff member a macaca--a reputed racial slur that may have made the difference in his razor-thin loss--he seems, in retrospect, almost pitiable, like the first proud, doomed lion ever to stare down a hunter with a rifle.

It's a spotlight. When TV comic Stephen Colbert addressed the 2006 White House correspondents' dinner, his searingly sarcastic "defense" of the President drew nervous laughter and awkward silence. Journalists in the room said he bombed. And that verdict might have been final, had the performance not been ripped from c-span and uploaded to YouTube. To online fans familiar with The Colbert Report and The Daily Show, the pained reception was part of the act. And to this vast audience, it killed. The ensuing debate (Was he funny? Was he rude? Was the press corps out of touch?) kept his critique in the news for days.

If YouTube provides distribution, the YouTube community's value-add is attention, finding significance in moments and creations that media gatekeepers shrug off. In 2005, the now defunct WB network rejected Nobody's Watching, a self-referential sitcom about the making of a sitcom (too inside, too confusing, probably too smart). This year the pilot was leaked to YouTube, drawing hundreds of thousands of viewers who raved about it. It was promptly bought by nbc. In Washington or Hollywood, the days when you could expect your bad decisions to disappear into the mists of time are disappearing. Somebody's watching.

It's a microscope. Web video proved the perfect medium for watching world news in extreme close-up, through video diaries from Iraq, Israel and Lebanon. Even with major news stories, TV news is constrained by budget and time concerns. Not so YouTubeland: 30 viewers or 30 million, it stays on the air, and the only limit is the enthusiasm of the uploader. So while mainstream media offered the sweeping panorama, video diaries took us where TV couldn't or wouldn't--running into air-raid shelters in the Israel-Hizballah war, crouching behind an armored vehicle with a soldier in Samarra, bullets dinging into metal off camera.

Most of the videos are poorly lit and badly composed. And they convey the confusion of war far better than expensive, competent TV. Journalists are trained to make sense, to frame stories and order facts, smoothing over random happenings and odd twists. In Web video, war is not a playing out of political-historical forces. It's Marine engineers sloshing down an improvised waterslide in a MySpace video. It's a soldier kicking back with an "Iraqi freedom cigar." In a terrifying, seven-minute YouTube clip, it's riding in the cab with a civilian driver as his truck takes fire and breaks down. "Come help me out!" he shouts to his military escort as the camera dives under the dashboard with him. "I'm going home when this s___'s done. When this s___'s done I'm f______ out of here!" On YouTube, war is also, appropriately, unbleeped.

It's a soapbox. Senator Allen's videographer, S.R. Sidarth, wasn't a disinterested observer. He worked for Allen's opponent, Jim Webb, whose campaign posted the video and used YouTube to fan the controversy expertly (and cheaply). YouTubers discovered the site's political power, from pundits to satirists making "mashups" (intercutting, say, a Dick Cheney speech with lines from Scarface).

Creative Response Concepts, the political-consultant group that gave us Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, produced online video against a Missouri stem-cell-research amendment this fall; next month it's opening a YouTube division. "It's basically the 21st century equivalent of direct mail," says CRC president Greg Mueller. The most effective YouTube spot in the Missouri election, however, was a TV ad with Michael J. Fox, which became an online sensation when Rush Limbaugh mocked Fox (who has tremors from Parkinson's disease) on his radio show. The ad got more than 2 million views and turned a state race into a national controversy. Does this mean that YouTube decided the midterm elections? There's no way of proving that. But given that control of the Senate turned on a few thousand votes in a few states, it's hardly far-fetched.

Perhaps more important in the long run is that the Fox ad was a bigger hit as a viral video than as a TV spot. YouTube had arrived, as a media outlet and as a social force--a place where ideas and images can spread instantly, cheaply, democratically and anarchically. Does YouTube aspire to become TV? These days TV should be so lucky as to become YouTube.

--With reporting by Karen Tumulty/Washington