YouTube

Please do NOT go to YouTube.com. I read and heard about it in the media but I snobbishly refused to surf to it: flat and nonsense entertainment fot the dumm masses. But eventually I couldn't help looking around the corner and I opened it. I had to force myself to close the site. What I saw was a dozen short videos of a street crossing in Tokyo, amazing because of the masses crossing: so many people in one place, like an army, passing and walking along each other with absolute no interpersonal communication, running across the roads over the striped paths, many of them their mouths covered with a pollution mask. And flights of home-built jet planes, from Holland of all places, making acrobatic loops and ... (the Dutch word for it is "capriolen", but the Babelfish translation machine first couldn't find this common word, and after I changed it into "kapriolen" it produced "cap sewers" which is the translation of "kap" and "riolen" and has nothing to do with the word I was looking for - Babelfish is really worth its name) anyway, and there were two sky divers (also from Holland, yes!) who before their parachute opened, managed to spread out a big white bed sheet with the words "Gelukkig Nieuwjaar" ("Happy New Year") painted on it, video-ed by a third skydiver.
I can imagine that people get hooked to this site, especially (which I didn't) when you subscribe to it and upload videos by yourself, rate the videos of others and place comments.
I wonder how much time is spent by people to Internet features. There are also lots of games, chatboxes, and other stuff which can absorb you completely, cutting you off from the tangible real world around you. Some of it is genuinely virtual, most of it is semi-virtual. Semi-virtual is the materials that allow you to enrich or improve your insights about the real world, provided that it works out in how you deal with the non-virtual day-to-day world around you, in other words, that you learn something from it. But I'm afraid that many of these games and entertainment stuff has primarily commercial goals. Which doesn't mean that their content isn't worthwhile. I think the YouTube-developers are the biggest freaks of all YouTube subscribers who take money as a nice side-effect. But YOUR goal with the site is YOUR satisfaction of a need that YOU have; the sitemaster knows that and can use it for HIS goal. It's the same with alcoholic drinks. I already noticed on this blog the crazy outsourcing of gameplaying to payed players by busy people who notice that they don't have all the time they need to complete the game they are addicted to.

Anyway, despite myself I think will become a regular "customer" of YouTube. Now make my first video (I feel myself a time traveler from the Stone Age sometimes).