Tikkabik

YouTube is actually a pretty good resource if you want video clips of the obscure or comical. I find myself looking there more and more first if someone mentions something funny or memorable to me that they've seen on TV recently, and more often than not I can find it.

It's also a great resource for people who have creative energy -- maybe it's just lip-synching to their favorite song, maybe it's a short video clip of their buddy getting his nutsack slammed when he was skateboarding that day. Maybe it's a complete short movie or TV show-style production. Whatever. I admire that, because it takes some planning, some shooting and editing skills, and, even if it's really low-rent, usually has some admirable production value. Sort of the video equivalent of listening to garage bands play on open mike night at the local club.

Sadly, YouTube's other big use -- as a Web resource for vloggers to post their thoughts -- is about as banal a waste of bandwidth as I can possibly imagine.

The site's already generated a cult following for a group of vapid attention whores -- both male and female, predominantly teenaged, and typically photogenic but without much of anything to say. And it's proven the axiom that has been proven over and over again since the dawn of desktop computing when the Mac was young -- just because technology lowers the bar to doing something (in this case, recording video) doesn't mean that it "democratizes" it in such a way that everyone who can do it should do it.

A lot of these kids would be wasting bandwidth (and surely are) just with MySpace pages, coming out with their endless streams of logorrhea about who kissed who at school, and what so-and-so thinks of me or what I think of them. Seeing them do it on video astonishes me -- it astonishes me that they're so blissfully unaware of how fucking retarded them come across on camera, and that they're not self-censoring enough to not hit the Upload button.

It also, frankly, makes me wonder what the hell these kids' parents are doing. Because if I caught any of my own kids doing this sort of uncreative, narcissistic, masturbatory crap, their computers would be gone from their room in a second.

Don't get me wrong: Just like with blogs, some vlogs are interesting, useful and insightful. But just as with blogs, the signal to noise ratio is absolutely frightful.