Poster and Youtube

It is important to note while discussing Mark Poster’s essay, “Postmodern Virtualities,” that it was written in the mid-nineteen nineties. I found many interesting references to the future (that is currently being enacted), to which we have a much different prospective than the essay.

First, one of the most striking example of the essay’s age was found in a quote from Philip Elmer’s Time article discussing the “forecast” of new media technologies: “The same switches used to send a TV show to your home can also be used to send a video from your home to any other- paving the way for video phones….The same system will allow anybody with a camcorder to distribute videos to the world…” (536). We now can see that although we have the technology for both, one has substantially changed and affected our lifestyles, while the other has yet to become popular.

Through Youtube, home-videos and produced videos can be viewed anywhere through a computer connected to the internet. Anyone has the ability to make a film establishing any opinion and have the potential for international recognition (like the “Obama girl”). Some Youtube home videos have become so popular; they are being broadcast by private television companies. The videos have the ability to be posted from one site to another, furthering their communicative reach.

Also, as expressed later in the essay, the Youtube phenomenon has spread panic through the ranks of produced videos with ownership rights. Television shows and movies that would otherwise require a fee can be viewed on Youtube for free. Even though the web site has tried to establish a way to stop people from pirating and using the copyrighted videos in other formats, they are still available for external use because of the evasiveness of the technology. For instance, one can still copy a movie from Youtube to a DVD in a rather simply process by reformatting the “copy-free” format.

Although the technologies have advanced, the ideas Poster discusses of the governmental v. personal agency remain. The realm of communication as certainly changed, and consequently compounded many of Poster’s ideas of the lines between “realities.”