Dumbed Down Thanks To YouTube

We only have 24 hours in day. Of that, if you’re lucky, 7 or 8 of those hours are spent blissfully snoozing away.

OK, that leaves 16 or so hours for everything else. The proliferation of all manner of electronic devices means that “entertaining” ourselves is not restricted to our “time off”. If it were, further subtraction would be necessary. We would take away 8 hours for work, an hour or two for eating meals, 2 hours for commuting and personal hygiene and would be left with about 3 or 4 hours of what I’ll call “discretionary time”.

In those hours, we could elect to read, watch TV or, more recently, navigate the internet. Shopping, exercising and other activities would use up the remaining minutes.

The average 2010 person is one who is constantly multi-tasking, however. Driving a car, eating, working out, bathing and even working a job are no longer done without the accompaniment of some sort of media consumption.

Of course, this is making us crave further stimulation—and is wreaking havoc on our attention spans. It is also making us far less discriminating in what we choose to spend time viewing—as it is no longer a solitary activity.

Enter YouTube.

The platform that has launched the careers of teen sensation Justin Bieber (who was “discovered” after his videos circulated on YouTube) and many others—has proven itself to be the great equalizer—and anyone with a Flipcam or cell phone videocam can distribute their “art” to a worldwide audience.

As such, we are inundated with these videos—many of which are truly entertaining—and many that are only deemed a waste of time after you have….uh….wasted your time.

Here’s one---OK, it’s cute, it’s funny—and it looks like about a half million people have seen it. A chubby baby does an unusual scoot across a tile floor. Check it out:






http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLtsUp5uSUc&feature=topvideos

Ha! Made you look!

Now, there’s 37 seconds of your life that you’ll never get back.

But, that’s OK, because it was the better part of a minute that really belonged to your employer, anyway, no?

It’s not everyday that you see something as riveting as THAT, correct? I hope that I have truly enriched your life today—or at least provided you with a chuckle. That poor child may never do anything in her whole life that gets as much attention as this butt-boogie did when she was an infant.

Let’s hope that’s not the case. Either way, we are fast reaching the point of saturation-where we will only open files and view videos that come from a trusted source. Then, if we have wasted our time, we’ll at least have a target to vent to---and another person to DELETE from our address book!

Hope it won’t be me.

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Tim.moore@citcomm.com