The YouTube Illusion
May 5th, 2008 • Posted in: Commentaryby Rushworth M. Kidder
PALO ALTO, California
At a conference here in Silicon Valley last weekend, I heard two predictions that fell together for me like tumblers in a lock. The first came from Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd, who pointed out that “only about 2 percent of the world’s data is digitized.” In other words, only a tiny fraction of our knowledge is currently available for use on computers, DVDs, or iPods. He expects that number to double in the next four years — a period during which, he says, there will be “more data created than in the history of the planet.”
Much of that information will be in video formats, which require immense amounts of data compared to print or audio. Hence the second prediction. It came from Google vice president Marissa Mayer, a self-professed geek who years ago was hired on as the infant company’s first female engineer. For her, the future lies in developing smaller, higher-capacity discs to store all of this data. She predicts that by 2015 you’ll be able to “carry on an iPod more video than you can watch in a lifetime.”
Taken together, those comments paint a heady future for the students at this conference, which was convened to honor the hundredth anniversary of the Castilleja School. By 2015, many of them will have graduated from this prestigious independent girls’ school and finished college. At that point, iPods in hand, they will come thundering into a workforce awash with moving images. How will this newly dense video culture impact their lives?
Some of the impact will be positive. They’ll have access to troves of video information unavailable to today’s graduates. At their fingertips they’ll find everything from sophisticated training manuals to classic Shakespeare performances. And when every cell-phone call is a video conference, they’ll be more in touch with family and friends, locally and globally, than any generation in history.
But what of the downside challenges? First, of course, are the ethical issues. One is pornography, which is already so pervasive that many corporations have developed tough and toothy sanctions to counter its corrosive effects on gender relations at work and at home. Put it all on iPods, and the evil expands exponentially. Another danger arises from abuse by those who use video to instruct viewers on everything from building nuclear weapons to cheating on tests. These ethical threats aren’t new; they existed in print as well. But the speed with which they can be communicated so vividly in the YouTube era is unprecedented.
The second downside is the sheer glut of information. Even if every iPod user had an hour a day for viewing, how would they know what to watch? The answer may lie in some yet-to-be-invented datavisory services. By providing customers with their own personal video broker or byte guide, they’ll help us sift through what’s available and extract the worthwhile.
More likely, however, tomorrow’s students will simply listen to their friends, either in person or through such sites as FriendFeed or Iminta that help them see what their acquaintances are watching. The result: The much-vaunted openness of the new video world will quickly become elitist. In television’s early days, everyone watched the same thing, making it hard for cliques to develop among those who had special access to the coolest stuff. That’s all changing: The new social stratification will depend on whose friends recommend the coolest stuff — and on who spends the most time watching what those friends are watching, for fear of missing something vital. What if that cuts into family or homework time, plunging students into lonely, screen-staring vigils in place of face-to-face conversations with real people? Is that too high a cost to pay for being on the edge?
And that raises a third video-culture challenge. Call it the silent scream, where the medium itself prevents those who use it from being heard. Like Edvard Munch’s 1893 painting “The Scream” — an iconic depiction of a desperate-looking, open-mouthed woman whose cry, by the very nature of oil on canvas, will never make a sound — the new video culture may actually be the medium that reduces human interaction. Those most yearning to be heard in the video marketplace will find themselves jostling for attention among a million other expressions. Their voices effectively will vanish, lost under a torrent of competing presentations.
And that raises one of the most subtly ethical challenges of our day: the marketing of new communication technologies as though they could actually democratize access to information. The central point of democracy isn’t that everyone gets to speak. It’s that others listen, that everyone’s voice matters, that every vote is counted. The grandly democratic promise of YouTube and its ilk — that they allow everyone’s work to be posted and shared — may ironically have the opposite effect. It may end up burying each individual work under so many gigabytes of other data that it stifles, not amplifies, the identity yearning for recognition and response.
This is not a plea to turn back the clocks or shoot all the programmers. It’s a plea for exercising our moral futurism, our capacity for over-the-horizon, predictive ethics. As we dash to develop ways to pack lifetimes of video onto credit-card-sized devices, we need to ask why we ought to do so — and what kind of moral world we are creating. If we’re smart enough to compress a whole Blockbuster store into a few digital-processing centimeters, surely we’re smart enough to foresee and mitigate the moral consequences of doing so.
©2008 Institute for Global Ethics
Questions or comments? Write to newsline@globalethics.org.
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[…] we’ve got YouTube. This week Rushworth Kidder in his posting on his Ethics Newsline as The YouTube Illusion poses varieties of challenges to the explosion of information and the inability to keep up with […]