The value of Youtube

If you haven't been following the news, there is an interesting situation happening where the press is blaming Barack Obama for some of the race-charged speeches his pastor has given. He's been attending this guy's church for something like 20 years, so I guess the question is whether or not these are the same things he believes.

The real interesting part, though, is how the Internet is coming to play in the story. As the Web began to spread, most people were proclaiming this as a new era of commentary and news sources. As though, with a billion blogs, you'll be able to get any side of the story that you want. Now there are some recent stats saying that most people are getting their news from fewer and fewer online sources, as the masses pass around the same snippets from AP, CNN, Reuters, or whatever. Well, I'd almost say that the best trend of the Internet isn't the greater number of sources, its the fewer sources. What people really need is a way to all see the same original set of facts (although these might not always be possible to agree on). But with the advent of Youtube, we've all got access to the same set of Original Documents. You can read any number of commentaries on the amazing speech Obama gave yesterday, but people are increasingly showing that the power of the Original Document can speak for itself. Nearly three million people watching this rather long video in only a few days is pretty amazing. This is the only way that Americans will experience a collective understanding, rather than a collective dumbing down:





Note, meanwhile, that instead of listening to me saying that Barack's pastor (Jeremiah Wright) is saying some stuff, now you can just as easily hear it for yourself:



The Internet... good stuff.