A Billion Clips a Day

Whatever claims to revolutionary credibility the internet might have boasted in its early years were pretty much laid to rest by 2006. That’s when Time magazine, the staid burgher of a declining print journalism tradition, named “us” as the Person of the Year. The reason was the alleged shift in power afforded by interactive digital technologies, which had finally delivered all us little folk to a place where our voices had risen in pitch and volume above all others. Our Time had arrived.

YouTube, the online video exchange service that delivers an estimated billion clips per day to its global audience, was only a year old when Time made its Neville Chamberlainish gesture to the common folk who were turning their attention (by the millions) away from traditional forms of print media and information. And while the news magazine’s blessing could be interpreted as mainstream media’s attempt to co-opt and subsume a new, user-dominated mode of...