All of you that lift of YouTube as some foil against "the big bad evil brainwashing junk" that is mainstream media ... seem naive to me. Have you actually seen what is on YouTube? Really?
Have you seen what is in books? Really? Most of it is garbage.
Youtube is the apotheosis of the medium of web video. As a medium it will suffer from all of the usual problems. There's no avoiding Sturgeon's law in any medium. But the existence of, say, Jersey Shore doesn't undercut the existence of The Wire the same way that the existence of Danielle Steel doesn't invalidate Mark Twain or TMZ.com doesn't invalidate wikipedia.
Even today there's a lot of great material on youtube that would not have been accessible before. Especially educational material. I cannot even begin to fathom what I've learned from youtube that I would not have otherwise. And that's just a tiny fraction of its potential.
OK, you picked two TV shows in your analogy to show that one "bad" show, I guess, does not discount good shows ... Well, so that is the point I am kind of making .. TV gets berated and YouTube gets lifted up? Why, other than, Internet? This just reiterates my point.
There is a clear attitude that "TV megacorporation junk bad" in the sense that it will "rot your brain" or "it has ads" or something vague and "YouTube good" and that is just naive.
