by Search Copywriter
Y. Sulaiman
Y. Sulaiman
It's been a good year for YouTube, by anybody's standards. In October, the world played witness to its high-profile takeover by Google for a staggering $1.65bn. Almost a month to the day later, Time magazine has named the online video sharing site as its 'Invention of the Year'.
Time magazine's Lev Grossman commented on the award:
"YouTube had tapped into something that appears on no business plan; the lonely, pressurized, pent-up video subconscious of America. Having started with a single video of a trip to the zoo in April of last year, YouTube now airs 100 million videos and its users add 70, 000 more every day."
YouTube inherits the accolade from 2005 winner Snuppy, a cloned puppy. In this year's race, it beat off competition from Gardasil, a vaccine which helps fight a sexually transmitted disease, and the Hug Shirt, an invention which simulates the feeling of being hugged by someone.
But is YouTube really an 'invention'? Its original founders - Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim - may almost be household names by now, but these Silicon Valley geeks turned high-profile web entrepreneurs didn't 'invent' the viral video; they simply granted people a forum through which they could share their own. In awarding YouTube Invention of the Year, Time are effectively making the long-overdue acknowledgment that the way in which we see the concept of 'invention' in today's world has changed irrevocably since the invention of the light bulb.
But YouTube has, in some sense, "opened a portal into another dimension". Through the site, people have been able to access footage from an increasingly diverse range of sources, from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to the ramblings of many a drunken student - and even the amusing antics of one well known SEO firm! Essentially, in blessing us with lonelygirl15 and playing a large part in exposing the Macacagate scandal, YouTube has changed the way in which we see the world and has forever altered the role of the traditional broadcast media.
Moreover, the success of YouTube owes much to the rise of social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and Bebo - and vice versa. These thriving web communities, as well as the user bases of sites like Wikipedia and Flickr, can only develop as their user numbers rise - this is because they rely on an increasing number of people creating and sharing information. YouTube has worked, quite accidentally, in tandem with these sites, developing a burgeoning user community that has done nothing but flourish in the last eighteen months.
Time magazine claim, "The way blogs make regular folks into journalists, YouTube makes them into celebrities," and herein lies the secret of YouTube's success. These celebrities are effectively us; and in a world where traditional forms of media are suffering ever-increasing criticism from public voices, YouTube gives us the authority to make and control the news. As inventions go, this one has to be one of the most powerful around.
