… i mean… the MAGNITUDE of experiences that lies around on YouTube!!
Today i watched:
-Toots Thielman and Stevie Wonder in a marvelous duet on harmonica.
-Stevie wonder and Tony Bennet in a duet that made me scream.
-Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles in a duet that made me cry almost.
-The full documentary of making the Sgt Pepper album by Beatles.
-I browsed among thousands of clips on Beatles, Wings, their concerts, backstage on making albums etc.
-Ray Charles on the “Johnny Cash show, doing “Ring of Fire” as a ballad.
…among other things.
I mean… there is not a moment captured on film in American music history that´s not on Youtube.
——
Since the fifties, the european audience has had to satisfy with bits and small pieces of American music culture over the decades, presented on radio or a few TV channels.
Now… it is ALL there to watch! All! Every little performance, no matter how small, is avalible within just a small searchphrase.
It´s hard to get used to. Many people using Youtube never get the fact that there´s more in there than just videos posted by idiots capturing their latest skateboard-trick.
The Youtube servers are the sum of modern culture. Like the Bible, only bigger, yes uncomprehensably LARGER!
There are such vast amounts of thrills in the form of captured performances that i´m getting religious about the shit. It never ends!
All the beauty from decades of musical treasures that has been us denied is right there!
Even Swedish treasures lies there…The Monica Zetterlund sessions with Bill Evans in Sweden in the mid sixties is there in a click. All the Swedish popbands from the fifties and forward are all there!
I mean… who puts it there? There must be millions and millions of people just DUMPING their private collections of archived material on YouTube.
I think this has a deeper layer of importance than what first meet the eye.
The whole world can now remember and recall our complete history in real time, at the same time, in every little corner of the world.
You see, of course, the German, Australian, Japanese and Mexican clips are there also. Not just Euoropean or American.
Think about it for a second. It is very hard to grasp.
Every litte thing you can think of, no matter how obscure, is right there before your eyes.
I tried searching on “Frösön” (the place where i live) for instance. In a second, hundreds of clips, from commercials to homevideos to black and white super 8 material just popped up (in the middle of two searches i made on “James Brown.”)
I wonder how this common concious will effect the world. Because it is a common, collective concious.
What began 15 years ago on the Internet as some fragmented bits and pieces of information, has grown to a well sorted Galleria or Mall, contaning our collective memory and perception of our modern history. Not just entertainment, but science, biology…yes all you can ever imagine as well!
Youtube is just one source among hundreds of thousands. The larger part is serious text of course.
“Wikipedia” http://www.wikipedia.com/ is much larger and nowadays even more relevant than all countires national encyclopedias.
Over one billion people contribute to the net nowadays.
Evening out the differences on how each culture percepts the world, our reality.
Evens it out to one common truth. Very little of the information is contributed by goverments. People do not trust govermental information on the Internet, nor do they trust official media channels. They trust eachother.
The power over the world is slipping through the fingers of the top-driven agenda. Like a soap in the bathtub. Impossible to catch.
Rupert Murdoch and his likes will have nothing on the world in just a few years.
Yea Yea, he runs a few papers and TV-channels, but.. hey… the traditional power structure hold by national or global TV-companies is becoming obsolete, or at least very desarmed and minimized in the next 10 years.
-Not because i say so, but because of that the consequenses of this democratic technology, will eventually create this change with no effort or drama at all. Completly transparent.
It just happens. -Pulling the rug from under the feet of dictators, censors, monopols and oligopols.
I almost feel sorry for them.
I´m not shure the world will be a better place in the hands of the public. The human race is not the smartest of mammals.
“Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups” as the quote says.
So we may just sit there with new problems on our hands, but with one big difference from now: “Every born human will have the possability to know everything about everything ever created by man, in real time. With almost no exceptions.”
This is a dramatic difference. -The Holocaust could not have taken place today as it´s existance relied on controlled information, from one source to a country of passive recievers.
The Internet has eliminated that possability once and for all.
Shure there are states like North Korea and China, that still tries to control the information and live as closed countries, but the rest of the world will have to deal with these late bloomers sooner or later. (If the don´t drop the bomb first, that is.)
Middle east is also a source of insecurity. As are third world countries in general. If we are ever going to achieve any kind of global stability, the differences between the richest and the poorest has to be evened out a bit. (It´s enough to even them out, we don´t have to eliminate the differences completly.)
Or else, everything i write having such high hopes in this text, won´t matter.
The rich, industrial world can not survive as a closed economical entity, ignoring the warzones or undeveloped countries.
-Well it can, for a while, but not in the long run. Our common global issues are too serious to continue pretending it´s business as usual.
Well well. Regarding the theme subject in this blog;
“With knowledge comes peace, stability, wisdom and security”, they say. I wouldn´t bet on it. Even if it´s true to some extent.
The human mind is created to compete, collect, win over others, own, strive, improve and develope. No one can take that out of our system.
So the question stands:
-Will these qualities in us evolve to make us care about eachother and the world, taking the good path?
-Or will they lead us into just another cycle of egoism, fighting for our own individual prosparity as usual?
Of this, i do not know. Time will tell.
/Stefan
