The YouTube team has built an exciting and powerful media platform that complements Google's mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
-- Google chief executive, Eric Schmidg ("Google buys YouTube," 2006, ¶5)
With its purchase by Google this October, YouTube has been rocketed into the public consciousness. Mainstream media reports have been chattering about what the business and economic implications of the merger are, but YouTube has been around for over a year now gathering, generating, and organizing video content. Amongst all of this, many are still left with the question, what is YouTube?
YouTube is not a new oral hygiene product or a water adventure park, nor is it a newly developed system for delivering troops behind enemy lines. Explaining YouTube is both simple and very complex. In the very simplest explanation, YouTube is a website that allows anyone to post (broadcast) video footage of. anything. Individuals who use YouTube post videos of homemade films, pirated music videos, photo-video montages, public events, subversive media, and just about anything else imaginable. Therefore, one might describe YouTube as merely a website where a public video repository exists.
YouTube, however, is more than just a repository. When considered within the greater context of a global information economy, YouTube becomes a critical link in a system that is quickly documenting, recording, archiving, and most importantly sharing all of the human existence. Now YouTube is part of the search giant Google whose mission is to catalog all information in the world ("Google Corporate Information," 2005). College-aged students are often the first to adopt and heavily use newly emerging technologies and systems like YouTube are no exception (Bausch & Han, 2006). Educators must become early adopters themselves if they hope to adapt to and take advantage of these developments. This need becomes more urgent as the world of higher education increasingly collides with the world of information sharing. College and university actors need to understand not only the risks that are associated with such widespread information sharing but also the tremendous potential for positive change that lies ahead.
When individuals are ill prepared for a free flow of information they often find their privacy unwittingly compromised. We are beginning to learn about some of the threats to privacy that face students online. The story of a student missing an opportunity on a job or an internship because of illicit or illegal disclosures of themselves on Facebook or Myspace is becoming all too common (Finder, 2006). Increasingly, YouTube presents the same threat to privacy as do these social networking websites. A search on YouTube using the keywords "college" and "drunk" returns over 1000 results of videos. These include footage of drunken college students involved in sexual encounters, attempting to defeat law enforcement, physically ill, and in some cases involved in attempts to take advantage of apparently inebriated women. A search for "college" and "party" returns nearly 1500 videos including one titled "FSU College Girls Summer Lingerie Party," which shows dozens of students partying and drinking in their underwear. It is likely that many of the students portrayed in these videos are completely unaware of the video's existence let alone its accessibility on the Internet. YouTube does allow much more anonymity than websites like Facebook because images are not tagged (associated) with people's names. However, this anonymity is counterbalanced when one considers that YouTube provides no access restrictions to these videos, allowing them to be viewed by anyone with an Internet connection.
Students are not the only people in the academy open to risk because of distribution systems like YouTube. In September, YouTube and other websites began to distribute a movie with the title "Stoned Professor" (Thacker, 2006). The video showed footage of University of Florida business lecturer John Hall teaching a class in September, 2006. The footage showed Hall acting very strange, breaking into spontaneous laughter and having trouble concentrating. At one point during the lecture Hall sprawls out on his back on the stage of the lecture hall, laughing uncontrollably. As word of the footage spread quickly, it began to get picked up by mainstream and industry media. The University of Florida quickly put Hall on a leave of absence (Thacker, 2006). There have been arguments as to whether or not Hall was actually under the influence of a substance or not, but regardless such an incident is a tremendous embarrassment to both Hall and the university.
The free flow of information also has implications for other interactions between the students and the university. On November 13, 2006 an individual at the University of California Los Angeles was forcibly removed by police from the campus library using tasers. As the encounter began, dozens of students began to pull out mobile phones and record pictures and video. In less than 24 hours, video footage of the incident was on YouTube for everyone to see. The individual is shown peacefully resisting arrest. Several bystanders objected to the police and they were threatened, being told they would be "tased" as well if they did not stand down. The university is now being accused of using excessive force and the existence, and availability, of these videos makes the claim difficult to refute (jedifreac, 2006; "Video Shows UCLA," 2006).
Both of these incidents provide examples of ways in which an institution can find itself in a public relations crisis because of the flow of information. With the increasing availability of video recorders on mobile phones, students have the ability to record happenings in the institution and then put those videos on the Internet. In fact one can now take a video with a cellular phone and immediately upload that footage to YouTube and other websites. University administrators are necessarily highly concerned with the availability of information in a variety of mediums (text, pictures, video, etc.) that are now flowing more freely. Strategies employed by administrators need to accept the reality that information can no longer be easily controlled and should look towards adapting to this new reality.
This free and wide availability of information can be a boon to higher education as well. The transfer, exchange, and creation of information comprise the fundamental building blocks of education. Information technologies provide creative and unimaginable ways for students and society at large to learn. Wireless networking technology has allowed students in classes to take notes collaboratively. Several students with laptops in a class can simultaneously modify the same document, allowing for collective and peer reviewed notes. Distribution systems very much like YouTube also present possibilities that higher education can implement to not only improve the quality of their education, but also to move farther towards the dream of universal access.
For instance, the Masachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has had for many years a web-based program called Open Courseware (OCW) which provides curriculum content from hundreds of MIT courses to anyone for free on the Internet. OCW is a wonderful societal force because it opens up access to these resources to those who cannot access them in more traditional ways. Yale University has announced that they will be starting a program similar to MIT's Open Courseware ("Yale to Make," 2006). The program, named The Open Educational Resources Video Lecture Project, will be making available videos of undergraduate Yale courses available on the internet for free. This further advances the dream of universal access by providing the course content available to anyone with a computer. The Hewlett Foundation, a major donor for the project asserts that "the world's knowledge is a public good and that technology in general and the Worldwide Web in particular provides an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse knowledge" ("Open Educational Resources," 2006, ¶2). A coordinated effort such as the Yale project can provide a lot of access to content, but democratic systems like YouTube provide the ability for students and educators to publish all sorts of educational content quickly and easily. Technology can be a great catalyst for creating not just new ways of learning and education but also new fundamental systems of education.
As information technologies develop, so will our ways of distributing and sharing information. YouTube is a step forward in this constantly growing system, allowing the average person to publish and distribute video content easily. These technologies will continue to blur the lines between public and private life, open the flood gates of public relations, and allow smaller voices to have an equal stage. At the same time, growing information access provides the potential to revolutionize the educational system as a whole. Colleges and universities must keep pace with this technology because their worlds are continuing to collide. If higher education hopes to be successful through these collisions they must adapt and take advantage of the opportunities that are presented rather than resist the change.
References
Bausch, S., & Han, L. (2006, July 21). Youtube U.S. web traffic grows 75 percent week over week, according to Nielsen//netratings. Retrieved November 16, 2006, from http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/pr/pr_060721_2.pdf
Finder, A. (2006, June 11). For some, online persona undermines a résumé. The New York Times, Retrieved November 16, 2006, from http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/11/us/11recruit.html?ei=5090&en=ddfbe1e3b386090b&ex=1307678400&pagewanted=all
'jedifreac.' (2006, November 15). UCLA student tasered by police in library. Retrieved November 16, 2006, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g7zlJx9u2E
Thacker, P. (2006, October 4). Whoa, Dude. Inside Higher Ed, Retrieved November 16, 2006 from http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/04/dude
Google corporate information: Company overview. (2005). Retrieved November 16, 2006, from http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/index.html
Google buys YouTube for $1.65bn.(2006, October 10). BBC News, Retrieved November 16, 2006 from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6034577.stm
Open educational resources. (2006, July 14). Retrieved November 16, 2006, from http://www.hewlett.org/Programs/Education/OER/openEdResources.htm
Video shows UCLA police using stun gun on student. (2006, November 15). KNBC TV Los Angeles, Retrieved November 16, 2006 from http://www.nbc4.tv/news/10325914/detail.html
Yale to make select courses available on the internet. (2006, September 19). Retrieved November 16, 2006, from http://www.yale.edu/opa/newsr/06-09-19-01.all.html