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As Levinson states, all new new media transcend both space and time. This is something truly remarkable. As humans, death is inevitable, but with the advent of new new media, death is quite different. "YouTube, in other words, has robbed death of some of its meaning..." says Levinson.
Levinson provides several great examples of some celebrities whom have been kept alive after their death thanks to YouTube. He points out the tribute to Roy Orbison in the song "End of the Line," where his guitar is placed on a rocking chair during when he carried the lead. George Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" still lives on in various versions despite his death. YouTube will make sure great musical artists live on in one way or another (Warning: This could also mean that terrible music lives on, but that's a matter of opinion).
For the most part, Levinson focuses on music, but YouTube can preserve several other celebrities, in particular athletes. Throughout YouTube there are highlights of Allen Inverson, Kobe Bryant, and Michael Jordan which could be fascinating for future sports' fans to watch. When discussing great players from your generation compared to great players of future generations, YouTube becomes extremely valuable.
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I like the topic, but of course YouTube simply extends the storage capacity that begins with collective human memory, as facilitated by speech and language, further enhanced by writing and printing, and the visual arts, and more so by the audiovisual media, photography, the moving image, and audio recording, and then electronic data storage. Alfred Korzybski called this basic human ability time-binding, and that understanding led him to develop the discipline of general semantics.
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