When it comes to identifying that very modern moment known as a tipping point, there is surely nothing more conclusive than an outraged "investigation" by the mainstream press. In that sense, one of the world's most talked-about Web sites decisively arrived in England last Saturday, when the headline "One Click Away From Corruption" flagged a double-page spread about YouTube.
"It started off as a harmless way for children to share videos on the Internet," the blurb said, ignoring the fact that YouTube advises anyone under 13 not to use it. Now, however, YouTube was apparently "fueled by horrifying images of soldiers being shot, animal cruelty and vile racism."
The same day, there came news that slightly undermined the idea that YouTube was turning into an online dystopia. Perhaps awaking to the site's law-enforcement possibilities by news that the US government has been posting anti-drug videos on YouTube, detectives in Manchester announced that they had put up a new appeal for information about the murder of schoolboy Jessie James, featuring his mother Barbara and sister Rosemary.
Meanwhile, some of YouTube's 35 million regular users went about their usual daily business, watching somewhere in the region of 100 million videos and adding around 65,000 new ones.
Last weekend saw one other bit of YouTube news: rumors that Google was about to buy the site for US$1.65 billion.
The company's HQ remained shrouded in silence.
Repeated e-mails to its press department produced a curt reply claiming: "We're experiencing an incredible amount of interest in the company at this time and will regretfully have to decline your interview/story request."
Naysayers
Naysayers continued to compare YouTube with Napster -- the music-sharing service that brazenly defied the entertainment industry, made an attempt at detente and then faded from view.
In Britain, the site is even more popular than in the US: 3.6 million are now regular visitors, watching or uploading videos free of charge. As any YouTube junkie knows, it can change your viewing habits forever. TV will suddenly seem hopelessly restrictive -- why gawp at a program schedule planned by someone else when you could be joyfully hopping from former US president Bill Clinton's recent explosive interview on Fox News, through newsreels of the Cuban revolution and on to a Beatles video you have never seen before?
Yes, in the site's virtual backstreets there do lurk militant Muslim propaganda films and bits of Nazi agit-prop. Closer to its thriving downtown, however, there is a wealth of more mainstream material. In the US, they are already talking about the arrival of "YouTube politics" and "the first YouTube war." But can it last?
The birth of YouTube is already a part of Internet folklore. Early last year, the site began life in San Mateo, California, when three ex-employees of the online transaction firm PayPal found themselves faced with a yawn-inducing problem.
Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim (who would subsequently step back from the company, retain his shares and become a postgraduate computer science student at Stanford University) wanted to share some digital video of a recent dinner party with half a dozen friends, but their e-mails kept being bounced back and posting the videos online seemed more trouble than it was worth.
Working in Hurley's garage, they came up with an extremely usable Web site that was too good to keep to themselves. That April, they went public with footage of Chen's cat.
On Tuesday, I received an e-mail from Karim, who is presumably now very wealthy indeed.
"Yesterday was nuts," he began, before sketching out his version of YouTube's beginnings.
"We did try to come up with something that filled the biggest current need," he said.
"As it turned out, video was just emerging on the Internet due to several factors. Broadband in the home, for the first time ever, was widely available. Digital video cameras were being sold en masse, including ones built into cellphones. And bandwidth had become very cheap. All these factors meant that YouTube was suddenly possible," he said.
Within a year, with their new operation based above a pizza shop, YouTube was showing 30 million videos a day. These days, there are about 60 staffers, many of whom spend their day trying to enforce YouTube's rules.
Among other prohibitions, the site allows no clip longer than 10 minutes and rules out material that is "unlawful, obscene, defamatory, libellous, threatening, pornographic, harassing, hateful ... or encourages conduct that would be considered a criminal offense."
Thanks to a system whereby users can flag any content they find "inappropriate," the site works surprisingly quickly. For example, within 24 hours of a UK newspaper story crying foul at a clip titled "Belfast man eating a dead mouse," it was nowhere to be found.
Sixteen months after its foundation, YouTube's core business seems to be based around two kinds of clips.
First, there are the home-made items that often inexplicably capture the affections of the site's users: the video of two US schoolboys lip-synching to the theme music from the Pokemon TV show that has notched up more than 16 million hits; the endless deluge of footage in which Mentos sweets are added to bottles of Diet Coke, with spectacularly explosive effects; the inevitable clips of accident-prone pets that prove, for all its technological dazzle, there is much in the YouTube universe that is indistinguishable from the content of You've Been Framed and America's Funniest Home Videos.
What gives the site much of its air of cool, by contrast, is its ever-expanding archive of music video. Rock classicists can find thousands of hours of Dylan, the Beatles and the Stones. Nearer the cutting edge, meanwhile, YouTube has become an obligatory aspect of the life of any new act.
In August, the site signed a deal with Warner Brothers, allowing YouTube to screen material owned by the company and just before the Google deal was announced, similar agreements were finalized with Universal Music and Sony-BMG.
In August, YouTube's aim of offering "every music video ever created" looked like hyperbole; now it looks at least conceivable.
According to the site's critics, however, acres of YouTube's content still sits in a very uncertain place. Even if every record company in the world signed a deal, it would only solve part of the problem -- given that rights are also owned by production companies, film studios and musicians themselves, the negotiation process could go on for ever. And what of the endless non-musical material taken from movies and TV that range from ancient sitcoms to iconic film scenes to recent news clips?
Most vocal
Among YouTube's most vocal Cassandras is Mark Cuban, a 48-year-old US billionaire who made his fortune via the Web radio company Broadcast.com and now owns the Dallas Mavericks NBA basketball team. Last month, he put a voluminous posting on his blog headed "The Coming Dramatic Decline of YouTube."
"You can pretty well bet that every copyright owner is going to be jumping up and down telling YouTube to remove every bit of content with any copyrighted material," he forecasted.
"The double worse news for YouTube is that it won't be easy. How are you going to tell Barry that he has to take down the video of Aunt Sally getting her groove on to Long Tall Sally and Uncle Willie doing the Hand Jive at his bar mitzvah?"
In response to an e-mail I sent him last week, he sent back further predictions of doom.
"If YouTube was smart," he said, "they would take down all the copyrighted material and build their business on user-generated content. The fact that they won't tells me they are afraid of what would happen."
When rumors surfaced that YouTube could soon be bought for well over US$1 billion, Cuban wrote: "No one in their right mind would do it."
On Monday night, mere hours before the Google deal became official, he was sticking to his script.
"Would Google be crazy to buy YouTube?" he pondered. "No doubt about it. `Moronic' would be the understatement of a lifetime."
And then came the big news. YouTube's problems were now Google's problems and though that meant they were now the burden of a multinational corporation rather than 60-odd people above a pizza shop, Cuban was still more sceptical than most.
"It will be interesting to see what happens next," he said. "I still think Google's lawyers will be a busy, busy bunch."
Even if copyright enforcement was to come crashing down on millions of YouTube clips, its place in the affections of millions would surely prevail. The crucial point is this: one of its essential rules -- that anyone with access to the most rudimentary digital kit can now make their voice heard -- is now so snugly built in to millions of lives that a world without it would be unthinkable.
Certainly, to hear some people talk, US politics is currently in the midst of nothing less than a "YouTube revolution."
If text-based blogging has yet to re-invent political coverage in the way that some people suggest, the power of the moving image seems to have allowed America's "video bloggers" to punch way above their weight.
Put simply, making political noise is no longer dependent on the goodwill of TV channels or radio stations: home-made campaign films can be posted on YouTube ad infinitum and as Rolling Stone recently put it, "any dolt with a handicam now can capture the unscripted reality of a candidate and disseminate it worldwide."
One of the most celebrated examples of the latter happened in August, when George Allen, a Republican US senator from Virginia and a possible US presidential contender, spotted an employee of his Democrat opponent at a rally and went into rhetorical overdrive.
His victim, a 20-year-old student of native American descent named S.R. Sidarth, was labelled "Macaca" -- an obscure term that in both French and Brazilian slang has racist overtones -- and, despite being born and raised in Allen's home state, Allen saw fit to welcome him "to America and the real world of Virginia."
Sidarth filmed it all, and the Democrats posted it on YouTube: within a week, Allen's two-digit poll lead had come down to a mere few points.
In the meantime, one corner of the US was caught up in the first YouTube campaign. In Connecticut, US Senator Joe Lieberman -- former US vice-president Al Gore's running mate in the 2000 US presidential election, and the kind of Democrat who sits so close to the Republicans as to make no difference -- was engaged in a bitter fight, built along the faultline of his support for the Iraq war, to regain his party's nomination against Democrat Ned Lamont, a more liberally inclined Connecticut businessman who makes his money from cable TV.
For Lieberman's tech-minded opponents, YouTube was a gift: they simply poured anti-Lieberman and pro-Lamont footage on to the site, linked the footage to other blogs and Web sites, and then watched its aftershocks ripple out into the wider world.
Among the most celebrated examples were film of US President George W. Bush greeting the senator with what appeared to be a kiss, and TV clips of a long line of conservatives, from US Vice President Dick Cheney to the notorious TV evangelist Pat Robertson, offering Lieberman their support.
In addition, there was a steady trickle of clips in which pro-Lamont activists pointed cameras at Lieberman and his aides and asked them testing questions. They played their part in a shock result: Lieberman lost out to his challenger and is now defending his seat as an independent.
Bob Adams, 47, works as an IT specialist in the Connecticut town of Milford. Over the summer, he devoted a great deal of his spare time to making anti-Lieberman films, managing to confront the senator (his best shot came with a testy encounter about donations from Wal-Mart) and posting about 50 clips on YouTube.
"This is another option for people who want to see what's really going on," he said. "And it's a very democratic thing: anyone with a video camera and a computer can get the same shots CNN can get. Political reporters have all that `You're off the bus' stuff to worry about; if they're denied access by the parties, they're going to starve."
"With someone like me, I don't have that much to lose. If I had to stop doing this tomorrow, it wouldn't make much difference to my life, except I'd have a lot more time to spend with my wife. So they don't have that power over me," he said.
Far right usage
In Britain, though YouTube's political influence is in its infancy, we may be slowly catching up. Thus far, the site's most prodigious users have been those whose access to the mainstream media tends to be limited. Contrary to YouTube's policy of ruling out anything "racially or ethnically offensive," there is a sprinkling of material credited to country's far right, as well as quite a lot of stuff centered around the idea that UK should leave the EU.
Further towards the mainstream, Tory opposition leader David Cameron's "Webcameron" clips have been posted, though the ruling Labour Party, in keeping with its rather woeful track record on new technology, does not seem to be interested at all.
Someone has thoughtfully put up UK Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott's apologetic speech over an affair with his diary secretary from this year's annual conference, but, strangely, YouTube traces the source to Belarus.
That said, the Labour Member of Parliament and recent anti-Blair plotter Sion Simon last week posted his own spoof of the Webcameron wheeze: a minute-long monologue featuring the strange line, "You want to sleep with my wife? That's cool -- just come down, we'll sort it out."
And then there is the small matter of war. Type "Iraq" or "Afghanistan" into YouTube's search engine and out it all comes: as well as material traceable to Islamist Web sites, there are scores of clips shot by coalition soldiers. British material is in relatively short supply, and tends to concentrate on carefully edited souvenir "end-of-tour" videos.
The US troops, on the other hand, go for grittier video including footage of shoot-outs, ambushes and aerial bombings, much of it soundtracked by grinding rock music. The phenomenon has so taken off that in July, MTV screened a clip-based documentary entitled Iraq Uploaded, strap-lined "the war network TV won't show you."
The same month, Time magazine called Iraq "the first YouTube war."
Anti-War views
Around 50 YouTube war clips are credited to a British source named "scipiouk." After half an hour on Google and a flurry of e-mails, I manage to talk to him on the phone: he is a former army reservist, who did a six-month stint in Basra with the Royal Green Jackets and now propagates his anti-war views by posting clips online, sourced from both his old army colleagues and unofficial military Web sites.
"When I was out there, all this was much more associated with the Americans," he says. "You'd see them passing round discs with stuff they'd shot on them. But British lads are waking up to it a bit more. A lot more people are using helmet-cams, which weren't so common when I was in Iraq -- you can buy them for US$200 from camera shops. And it's the only way you can get your thoughts across: now, you sign a non-disclosure agreement when you join saying you won't talk to the press, and when you leave, you won't write Andy McNab-type books. So this is a way of letting people see what's happening out there for themselves."
"Very soon, we're going to be hit with a lot of stuff from Afghanistan," he says. "I've got a few mates who've just gone out there, and I'm expecting to get a lot of stuff from them when they come back."
Meanwhile, as news of the Google buy-out spread through YouTube's millions of users, there were the inevitable moans of disquiet. As things stand, a multinational corporation seemingly has no greater chance of posting a popular YouTube video than a 15-year-old with a camcorder and the site's bashful use of advertising only furthers the sense of commerce taking a back seat.
Visit Google Video, Google's far less popular equivalent of YouTube, and you find an altogether more cash-driven set-up: its front page offers the obligatory home-made clips, but its "featured" section rather tediously flags up The Cartoon Network, a new Oasis DVD and Sky Sports' coverage of the Ryder Cup.
The worry is that YouTube will become just another money-making Web site. Tuesday, it was smattered with anti-Google videos, and the accompanying message boards were full of hastily typed protests.
For one user, a visit to Google Video had provided a worrying augury of the future: "I wanted to watch an interview, but I was only able to stream three minutes of it ... if I wanted to watch the whole interview, I would have to `download' it for 99 cents. That is ridiculous! Video should be free!"
On Monday, YouTube bosses Chad Hurley and Steve Chen posted their own clip on their site. Standing outside what looked like a branch of TGI Friday, Hurley assured their viewers that they were going to "concentrate on developing the best service for you ... so you can keep having fun on our site."
Their words, however, said a lot less than the giggly demeanor of two people who apparently could not believe their luck. For two ex-IT guys, that chimerical fantasy known as the American Dream had come true; after about a minute, they broke into uncontrollable hoots of laughter.
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