I'll admit it. I'm a YouTube junky. I spent far more time than I should watching user's video diaries, TV show clips, Star Wars fan films, and animated stick men pounding each other into submission until, as my five-year-old son says, all the "ketchup" comes out of them.

But I bristle when people suggest that YouTube is just a waste of time. I'm continually amazed at the quality of some of the submissions. I've asked myself over and over again what motivates people to spend so much time creating and posting a video they have no guarantee anyone will see. I'm sure the motivations are as individual as the posters themselves, but the more I learn about the purposes behind oral tradition and oral cultures, I wonder if YouTube in a sense represents a return to society's pre-literate roots.

I'm probably over-interpreting what oral tradition is, and maybe I'm offending some by even suggesting goofy, amateur videos should be mentioned in the same breath as The Iliad, but I'm just going to present a few examples and let readers judge for themselves. Please let me know what you think.

Take someone like Brookers, for example. She's one of the most popular video bloggers on YouTube. Most of her skits as silly. Some are downright stupid, but I wonder if she represents the modern culture of technology in which she and her peers live. Young people are connected. They are more willing to share of themselves. They are surrounded by and heavily influenced by the media. By adding their interpretation to well known tune or TV program, they demonstrate what the 21st century is all about.

Along the same lines, I offer a couple of interpretations of well known songs here. YouTube offers a special category for musicians, and some, including Esmee Denters and MiaRose have catapulted to record deals because of their YouTube popularity. These artists have made me wonder if Kelly Clarkson's Breakaway might be the new Iliad or Odyssey that bards choose to perform. At the very least, using YouTube to springboard a music career falls squarely inline with the culture of instant celebrity shows like American Idol (notice the Kelly Clarkson connection?) have created.

While I'm stretching this metaphor to its most absurd potential, I'll finally submit a poster my son and I really like, simply for the beautiful simplicity of tumbling, multi-colored plastic bits. Flippycat has added more than 30 movies of him and his cat simply knocking down dominoes, but I'm so mesmerized by nearly all of his videos, that somewhere deep inside, I wonder how much better it would be to see on of his performances in person.

Before I launch into scholarly discussion of oral traditions and the Internet, I thought I would introduce myself briefly and explain why I'm writing. Just in case anyone from outside class ever reads this, I'm doing this for more than just a grade. I've wanted to start a blog for a long time. The class just gave me a good excuse to do it. The analytic nature of the class in question also gives me pause to examine why I have wanted to join the thousands, even millions, of others sharing online and just what we might get from this endeavor.

I've always had a compulsion to share, but I've also always needed structure. I can't write without deadlines and well defined audiences. Maybe that's what led me to a newspaper career. At a newspaper, I could feel good about sharing because the news I related was supposed to inform lives and in the grand sense, enrich democracy. Blogging, as fun as it was to read, seemed a bit useless to me. A lot of it seemed like the rants and raves of isolated loaners. As high minded as I tried to be however, I quickly found I was participating in sites that meshed with my interests, no matter how inconsequential they seemed. The two sites I contribute to frequently deal with the most mundane of topics: sports and video games.

Overcoming this compulsion to change the world with my writing was the first step. The second deals with writing without a deadline. I guess the class kind of takes care of that for this exercise, but I hope it teaches the discipline I'll need to continue even when I'm not graded.
Finally, the last obstacle is the need for an editor. I think I'm a good writer, but I've always subscribed to the notion that a good editor helps even the best writers. While blogging, I thought I'd miss having that guidance, but frankly I don't. In fact, I've got more editors now than I could have ever imagined. One of the most nurturing aspects of the blogosphere is its collaborative and cooperative. On another blog to which I contribute to publicize my research, I've been pleasantly surprised at how willing to share and how polite most Internet users are.

The only thing I still need to work on is not worrying so much about whether my entries are perfect before publishing. Maybe this is also something readers can remedy. The more they want, maybe the faster I'll work.

In other words, I hope you enjoy what you see here. If you do, drop me a line!