It is not as recent as it may seem. Cat playing with the piano-roll on iPad: 1,300,000 views in 2 weeks. 3-year-old kid spreading her breakfast over the kitchen table: over 100,000 views in less than a few days. Another young girl (tagged as a 3-year-old, but come on… she is much older than that, is it such a must to exaggerate?) cries that Justin Bieber doesn't love her – then laughs out loud, because her lament was simply a joke. But even this latter video earned over 1.5 million views altogether. This tendency has been present since years.
Even CNN covered the issue in its spotlight column. Although parents tend to be careful about their anonymity, these videos going viral will surely make some embarrassing moments for their children later on in their lives. Even further than that, parents will have to face the consequences of such publicity in the form of hostile comments that blame them for showing off with their children. But that’s not even the point.
The point is the enormous attention these videos get in such a short time. And among the thousands of comments (most of them which are published at the exact same second below the video, such is the buzz on the forums), there are quite a few complaining about how the recent decades of immense technological development resulted only in people constatnly turning on their Blackberries to watch one of the new “featured” YouTube videos. Yes, people want short, immediate entertainment. Do these videos offer short and immediate entertainment? Yes, they do. Nothing wrong with that. Still, if these videos appear the “Most Favorited” and “Most Commented” anyway, why feature them separately, as YouTube does? For most people who signed up to a YT-account, the previews of these videos will cover their entire start-page.
YouTube has become such a vast collection of videos; and featuring a clever search engine or the option of creating specific tags for videos is not enough to provide a guide in exploring this endless material. Especially if YouTube organizes its videos in such a way that, as a consequence, “the video of the day” draws another half a million (otherwise totally indifferent) viewers to witness how a cat scratches the screen of its owner’s brand new iPad...
