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Like Levinson explains about YouTube, and almost all new new media- they have democratized society in unimaginable ways. The ability, as he explains for amateurs and nonprofessionals to post videos that can be viewed by anyone and everyone is revolutionary.
Within the past few months, however, YouTube has started placing advertisements before some videos' content. On the surface, this seems almost expected as it allows for YouTube to increase its revenue, and to receive other benefits from doing so. But after reading Levinson's chapter and giving more thought to this, enabling ads on videos is possibly one of YouTube's many steps to toward it becoming just another highly concentrated media. There are ads now, which makes it possible that in the future, YouTube will force viewers to pay for content (similar to what Hulu is in the process of doing now).
And if this happens, does that take away from what Levinson has been saying about YouTube and new new media in general? Will YouTube become a part of the machine that it first broke down? Does it make YouTube less of a democratizer? My initial thoughts tell me that though the consequences of YouTube becoming more commercialized over time won't be extremely drastic and horrid, but it still changes the foundation of what YouTube was when it was first created.
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Excellent questions. As I mentioned in a previous post, one of the consequences of YouTube's increasing commercialization is that some people are getting fed up with it and moving on to other alternatives, such as Vimeo or Blip, or even Skype. I guess this is much like how teenagers tend to reject music that has become to mainstream, and seek out alternatives.
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