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CHAPTER 8 - WEB VIDEO AND HOW IT IS CHANGING THE WORLD

MY CRAZY CHALLENGE
CHAPTER 8 - WEB VIDEO AND HOW IT IS CHANGING THE WORLD
Every minute, almost two weeks of video material is uploaded to youtube. If you wanted to see all the videos that get uploaded within a month, it would take you 1.500 years of 24/7 watching. Pretty insane, and it will only get more. A very nice video that demonstrates the changes of the new media, made in 2009 (!), is 'Did You Know 4.0'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ILQrUrEWe8
There is a beautifully told story about Youtube, how it started and how it changes the world. Anthropology professor Michael Wesch spoke at the US Library of Congress in 2008 about the "anthropological introduction to YouTube'. What you will see is an amazing insight into a world that you probably didn't think you would find interesting. You'll learn about the 'Numa Numa song', a music video from a Moldovan-Romanian band that makes it all the way to Japan, gets newly interpreted and goes to the US, where a guy dances hilariously to it and records himself on video, which in turn gets sent all around the world and was probably watched 600 million times. And that was in 2004, 1 year before YouTube even started. You will also find out about all the amazing ways that humans are sharing with each other, celebrating the joy of life, adding their own interpretation to a video and all joining in.
The video unfortunately is blocked in certain countries due to copyright issues with music in it, but if you search a bit you might find it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0F_EOquQtZg
Also Chris Anderson, the curator of TED, speaks about how web video powers global innovation. In his talk, he tells about a six year old kid who learned how to do the craziest dance-moves through youtube, and quotes filmmaker Jonathan Chu about dance: "Dancers have created a whole global laboratory online. Kids in Japan are taking moves from a YouTube video created in Detroit, building on it within days and releasing a new video, while teenagers in California are taking the Japanese video and remixing it to create a whole new dance style." Anderson calls this phenomenon 'crowd accelerated innovation', and it works in any field where there is a large enough crowd to produce and share content.
http://www.ted.com/talks/chris_anderson_how_web_video_powers_global_innovation
A propos dance: this one is absolutely unbelievable:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZmv1YJnszw
A similar phenomenon of people joining in and sharing together is the Virtual Choir conducted by Eric Whitacre. He basically invited people from around the world to record themselves singing a part of a choir, and combined all the >2000 voices together in one gigantic choir. A beautiful project:
http://www.ted.com/talks/eric_whitacre_a_virtual_choir_2_000_voices_strong
You can also stumble over just cool stuff made by people like you and me, who want to share something, like this piece on Plato's philosophy in the form of an 8-bit videogame:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVDaSgyi3xE
Or, you can see the former Canadian defense minister talking about UFOs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcTXuz-7tDU
See one of the first Jetpacks:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yolum7_0UCA
or the 'Jetman' Yves Rossi, flying like an airplane through the sky:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2sT9KoII_M
You can watch the 113 year old movie "Voyage Dans La Lune" by french filmmaker Georges Méliès, and see how people back then imagined flying to the moon:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FrdVdKlxUk
Or you decide to get into crazy stuff and check out some of the '172 documentaries to expand your consciousness', mostly made by small independent filmmakers who through the internet have a way to broadcast their message to a broad audience:
http://www.collective-evolution.com/2014/02/01/170-documentaries-to-expand-your-consciousness/
I didn't go into how web video is a tool to publish and spread what's really going on, be it during the Arab Spring or as a contrast program to the corporate-controlled media. But that's a whole other topic.