The internet is a wonderful thing part 2.

[glaston]

This is from a different perspective though.
To me the internet has always been mainly an information/learning resource.
Which reflects my earliest exposure to it.
But I remember in those days I wished it was more than it was.
I remember reading about the Internet2 back in the mid and late 90's which was described as high bandwidth media networks that consolidate services.
Where you can have access to any movie ever made, any song, the electronic version of any book.
And I didn't give it much thought then because it sounded like the kind of thing that wouldn't end up happening.
In those days the web was mostly text based, and the social aspect was limited to chat and boring **** like that.
No widespread commercialization really.
This is in like 1996-99.
My area didn't even have broadband yet until very late 1999.
I remember thinking how great it would be to have those services available.

Enter YouTube.
2005
I like to check out the Linux channels on youtube and the google tech talks.
I came across a presentation on the scalability of the YouTube systems on Friday.
It was amazing!
I can't stop thinking about it.

A team of 4 guys developed YouTube.
With SuSE
ANd once it launched they ran into an enormous amount of difficulty where they were solving 1 bottleneck after another around the clock.
And just dealing with every single one as it came up.

With what must have been nerve-racking for them, but stuff like deleting swap partitions on machines while they're running in an effort to force as much data as possible to be served directly from memory.
Running into limits on the amount of files a directory can hold under ext3, so then having to convert the filesystem to reiser on every single machine.

Being bogged down by database replication and power consumption.
With no room for error because all the systems were running at 100% consumption of all resources and they couldn't get additional hardware at the rate they needed it.
They were pushing these machines and the software on them to new lengths.
I mean I always knew that it was a revolutionary service.
The kind of thing that you never actually thought about in realistic terms until it was launched.

But to see it from this perspective now is incredible.
I can only imagine how rewarding that kind of success is!

But it doesn't end here.
So all weekend my mind is reeling about this.
I'm reading white papers, more videos.
Old hacker documentaries that are talking about the internet in the 80's, before my time.
My sister and my niece came yesterday.
My niece is really into videogames and ****.

She wants to know if she can log into her YouTube account and watch videos lastnight.
So she's in there laughing and carrying on while I'm doing my own thing in the next room.
Next thing I know, my girlfriend, my sister and niece and my aunt and cousin are all in there carrying on.
Music goin, everybodys laughing and ****.
All of the sudden it's like I'm in a bar or something.
So I go to the door and I'm watching.
There's videos of kids doin stupid ****, acting out little comedy skits and things that I would never see if this situation hadn't presented itself.
So I have to ask.
"What the hell are you guys watching"?

"YouTube celebrities"!
So I just say "great whatever".
That's not my thing so I go back to what I'm doing.
I really didn't give it much thought, "YouTube celebrities", duhh.
But I'm thinking this is weird because I can't get this whole thing about the guys who created youtube out of my head.
I'm in there reading about psyco, the dynamic python compiler used in YouTube.
And things go quiet in the other room.
A weird kind of quiet.
So I'm listening harder now.

Now they're in there having this strange sort of somber moment.
So I gotta know now.
"WTF is goin on around here".
I go back to the door.
Their huddled around the monitor, people got tears rolling off their cheeks and **** now.

So I ask "are you guys freakin losin it"
First it's all laughs now it's all tears.

"Aww, this is so sad"
"This girl is a YouTube celebrity, she started making videos when Youtube first started".
"Now she's leaving YouTube to be on MTV and she's sayin bye to all her fans and talking about how her dad died".
My niece is all hyper and **** like she drank a pot of coffee.
She's bringing up these videos for me to watch.
Saying how she wants to be just like this girl.
Her fans love her so much they bought her a car and ****.
And it's this girl with a huge gap betwen her teeth talking in this really messed up voice, and she's like eating a stick of craft paste or something.
Now everyone's laughing again.
I just got the hell out of there.

But I started thinking.
Here I am, feeling real inspired by these 4 guys who went through hell to create youtube, thinking back on he days of the old internet.
And it hit me that this was what I wanted the internet to be.
Only, now it's populated by morons, that are making the next generation even bigger morons.
I started to get a little concerned.
Because **** like this can't last!
There won't be anywhere left to go from here.
But then I remembered that the world is supposed to end in 2012 anyway.

What a culture we humans have created, no?

[hazel]

This is simply the Internet version of "Hazel's History of Computers."

In the eighties, computers were toys for geeks and hobbyists.
In the nineties, computers were tools for ordinary people.
In the noughties, computers have become goggle-boxes for idiots.

Except for computers that run Linux of course!

[aluminumspleen]

wow. I had no idea that much went into making youtube. I never really thought about it...it was just there once, and was a great way to waste time. It really is a revolutionary idea for the internet.

I haven't been around that long, but I do remember when the internet used to come in the mail. AOL would send free disks that gave you a few hours online for free, but this was back in the days of dial-up, so it took you a few hours to get anywhere on the internet.

I also remember when a librarian in 8th grade introduced me to Google. I thought "Google, what's the point of this site?" Now I visit it upwards of 100 times a day! Also, now that I understand more about computers than I did in 8th grade, I can see the wonder that it also holds.

thanks, glaston, for another perspective on the issue. It's really opened my eyes even more to the wonders out there through my ethernet cord.

[arinlares]

read the book High Tech Heretic by Clifford Stoll. He talks at great length about the "merits" of the internet (many of which I fell victim to). if he were to revise it this year, your post, glaston, would be the main point. I wonder how YouTube's creators feel about their baby's effects on the world? They did a great thing, but it's horribly abused.

[glaston]

Except for computers that run Linux of course!

That's the thing.
YouTube is based on SuSE Enterprise Linux, only lightly modified and pushed to extremes.
It's incredible!
A monumental achievement from a computing and business perspective both.
The kind of thing that would be great to see put into a documentary.

And it has a real dark side, that wasn't the intent the creators had.

Something like that has the possibility to be a major form of peer pressure for teenagers.
It's physically impossible for there to be a way for human beings to oversee this.
There's too much video going through there for it to be screened by humans.
That would be a bottleneck that would cripple the service.
They talk about this, that they'd been contacted pertaining to copyright infringement and that they had difficulty removing videos within the time frame that was imposed on them.
Because it's way too much data to be dealt with in any other frame of time except milliseconds, without slowing the service.
So then the only reasonable way to deal with it is with tags and metadata, and limiting the time to 10 minutes max per video(the only videos that are longer are by long time "Director" account types that were created before the 10 min limit was put into effect).

But ultimately it's still up to the parents to decide what their kids see.
Which isn't an accurately measurable quantity.
And we live in a time period where having your face on TV somehow(even bad publicity is publicity) is the ultimate measure of success.
That's especially true the younger the person.

It's the "Simple Life Syndrome", combined now with viral marketing.
And because the free market system is so powerful, ethics has been gradually disassociated from it because it effects marketing potential.

You have these kids that despite what adults see, have a dramatic effect on other kids.
An adult might see kids having fun and acting stupid.
Harmless right?
Wrong.
That's not what the kids see.
The kids are being bombarded with suggestive imagery.
Hair styles only achieved by buying expensive hair extensions, excessive name branding in the clothing industry.
Because kids broadcasting on YouTube that get view counts in the millions, attract the attention of the marketing industry.
Which is an extremely wealthy and profitable industry.
Where people throw around large sums of money anywhere they see potential.
Because ROI(return on investment) is high and can be easily controlled when the "talent" is basically a young kid that above all else is extremely desperate to be famous.

Kids are being molded into "super consumers".

Remember in the 80's when ads for videogames showed images of families playing them?
Well, now that's turned into one of those simple line shaded images, more like a public sign you'd see somewhere telling you what line to get into for customer service.
Where the girl has an iPod, the boys got a laptop, and mom and dad aren't even in the scene anymore.
Because showing 2 people passed out on prescription drugs isn't an image that promotes a consumer friendly atmoshphere.

There are still alot of parents that see this.
There has to be.
But the majority of adults are focused on debt, and anything that keeps the kids occupied can't be a bad thing.

If you didn't know better, you'd think it was a perfectly orchestrated puppet show.