PresentTense: A newspaper this week explained to its readers that "the YouTube craze first came to prominence [ in Ireland] several months ago, with the graphic and violent portrayal of a 'happy slapping' incident in Ballymun . . . " That's not unlike saying that the literature craze came to prominence here when Ulysses was banned.
What the report, of course, was actually saying was that YouTube came to prominence here when it provided the media with a decent "isn't it awful?" story. A nasty video it was, but its emergence allowed elements of the press to crank up the melodrama through a trusty triumvirate of questions: Who's going to protect our children? What are the politicians doing? Aren't new things very frightening?
It also allowed YouTube to be filed into a recognisable, and crowded, box. So that this week, months later and in a story that was actually about politicians' use of the site, a technological and cultural phenomenon that has altered the balance of the media, threatened television, destroyed politicians and wasted millions of employee man-hours, can still be anchored in a simple frame of reference: "My YouTube Hell." Amid this melodrama, the more interesting things have been happening among the background extras. Among the lesser-noted videos, are those who post one-off snippets from their lives, sometimes edited to music, and usually without any direct dialogue.
They say something about a moment in their week, and will eventually say something about a moment in this era. It's likely that they will even prove useful to future archivists, as they proliferate in the quieter parts of YouTube, away from the happy-slappers and boys setting their nasal hair on fire. Although it's unlikely anyone will be interested in a piece headlined: "My Potentially Useful Social History Hell."
It's worth searching for your home town in YouTube. In giving you a seat in a neighbour's head for a few minutes, before chucking you out again, it has a certain Being John Malkovich-edge to it.
When it comes to my home town, anyway, there are a couple of broad categories that stand out. The first features tourists' quick visits. They come down. They kick some shells around the beach. They can hardly be heard because of the sound of the gale roaring into the microphone. Then they metaphorically tick your town off their list of places they've done and - abruptly - move on to somewhere else, where they do roughly the same thing all over again.
More interesting is the second category, which features local youngsters. As you get older, obviously, age begins to cloud your view of the inner workings of youth culture. You become, in a sense, "demographically challenged". But YouTube - as with Google Video - is suddenly offering a glimpse from the inside. Before watching a few of the videos and photomontages posted by Irish teens you might assume that their interests largely revolve around staving off boredom with abrasive music, pranks, play fighting, clowning around with the opposite sex, and cans of Dutch Gold. Then you watch the videos and guess what you learn? That it's all true. But then, nobody ever claimed it was going to be Carver-esque.
It's an eerie sensation to have people come to life on your computer screen whom you vaguely recognise from the train, or the supermarket, or from hanging around looking bored while fiddling with their mobile phones. The landscape is recognisable, but the angle is somewhat skewed, the point of view both familiar and alien. It's available for anyone to see, yet it carries the faintest sense of voyeurism.
That sense of slight disconcertion is added to by how these images have not yet been filtered by the passing of time. They are recent and fresh and raw. YouTube, remember, may have rooted itself deeply in the landscape of modern culture, but it has been around for less time than most middle-aged mayflies. Some day, these videos will no doubt provide a nostalgic diversion for their stars, once they've moved on in their lives, changed their friends, and upgraded to Cabernet Sauvignon.
But more than that, as YouTube gathers increasing numbers of these snapshots, in a piecemeal way, and probably extenuated by their banality - and presuming the site doesn't decide to have a clear-out - they will offer some future historian a handy archive of living social history.
Today, it's a chance for the curious/nosey to peer through the eyes of neighbours and strangers, to tut-tut at the antics of the young folk, to wonder why the tourists don't stay a bit longer.
But tomorrow, they'll be of use to someone.
A local historian will give a talk using these videos as illustration. A cultural historian will examine the youth culture of a distant time, captured on crude mobile phones. In a university somewhere, someone will take two years to write a doctoral thesis on the place of Dutch Gold in early 21st-century Ireland.
