Media has a huge role in reflecting and shaping our culture. YouTube, a popular video hosting website, is playing an important role in defining current cultures around the world.
YouTube’s focus has always been “Broadcast Yourself”. It’s an outstanding website that has radically transformed the way we think about broadcasting our voices and our personalities to the world.
Forbes’ Michael Noer reasoned that technology had finally become poised to disrupt how people learn, given the advent of widespread broadband, low costs to create and distribute content, rapidly proliferating mobile devices, a shift in social norms to accept the efficacy of online learning and a generation of tech-savvy people willing to embrace it, had students watching lectures and working on their own schedule at their own pace.
YouTube is the largest video platform on the globe and with great fame comes greater responsibilities…so here I’ll tell you the negative and positive sides of YouTube.
Starting with the positive side:
- YouTube has played a central role in creating instant internet celebrities, promoting musical performers, providing opportunities for political and religious speech.
- YouTube has also created an electronic town hall where people can air their opinions on their governments, the police, or authority in general.
- Students can watch videos explaining things related to school to help them learn or understand something. On the other hand, teachers may show videos in the class to help the students learn things since sometimes the videos are created by experts of the subject or may be a recording from another source.
- YouTube is commonly used for entertainment purpose, you can see any type of videos you want, comedy, thriller, TV shows, just name it.
- It is possibly faster to gain news through YouTube and share it for other people to know.
- Outside, discussing YouTube videos, may lead into strengthening social relationships.
- YouTube is also being used for raising awareness about some issues and causes that should be known by a larger audience.
Coming to the dark side of this popular social media:
- Some personal-information videos, such as those depicting uploaders’ self-harm, may have a negative impact on viewers. Such videos may encourage, normalize or sensationalize self-injury, may trigger viewers to self-injury, and may reinforce harmful behavior through regular viewing.
- The ability of videos to bring fame to oneself or humiliation to others has motivated physical violence.
YouTube has the potential to create controversies, resulting in censosering or banning it by numerous national governments to limit public exposure to content that may ignite social or political unrest, to prevent violations of ethics-or morality-based laws, or to block videos mocking national leaders or historical figures. - According to a study, online media offer a way to push back against enduring stereotypes. Videos uploaded on YouTube can spread propaganda and outright lies. How do we know that what we see in a video clip posted by a “citizen journalist” is not a manipulated montage? For example, there was a video of two girls beating an eve-teaser and everyone was praising their courage but next day someone from the eye-witnesses told the media that the guy wasn’t the culprit infact he was the victim as the girls asked someone to make a video of them and started beating the guy without any reason.
- And just like other social media, YouTube is also an addiction as watching videos one by one waste a lot of time.
As a conclusion, I will only say that we should use YouTube efficiently, we can always watch the things we like but never let the wrong things manipulate your mind.
