Facebook and Youtube my new news channels...

Where were you when you heard of Taylor Swift's sad encounter with Kanye West?
I know where I was! I was sitting at my desk trying to write a paper and doing what every good college student does on a regular basis: checking Facebook.

As I was checking Facebook, everyone in my news feed started to change their statuses to different variations of not so nice words to Kanye West. From profanity to disappointment these statuses told me something was wrong. Again, instead of doing my homework I decided to investigate and see what had happened. After checking Google news and CNN I decided to turn to Youtube. After a few search terms and a few clicks I watched Kanye's rant about Taylor Swift in high definition a mere 10 minutes after it had happened.

I did all of this without moving from my desk, or from my chair. All in a matter of minutes I had gotten my information, discussed with a few people and had gone back to my homework.

When it was time to talk about real news, I had no idea what happened outside of campus but I sure knew about Kanye and Taylor and I could carry an extensive conversation about the incident.

That is when I realized that too many times I had used Facebook and Youtube to get my information, right or wrong, without really trying too hard. Either from my bed or my desk all of this information was at my fingertips on two websites that at first were there for entertainment but now are my sources of information.

When people post news articles, videos and images, I immediately click on them and they lead me to a wealth of information. Sadly, I don't need to open a newspaper, watch the news or actually go looking for my information because one of my friends on Facebook has already done it for me.

The other thing about Youtube and Facebook and all of the other things like Twitter (which I use to stay in touch with Romanian friends and news), Flickr and MySpace, is the fact that people are taking control of their news and they are making something news worthy within minutes.

For example just last weekend I was sitting on the couch with my roommates watching a movie, when I checked my Facebook and again 2 or 3 people had changed their statuses to something about Adam Lambert. I vaguely remembered the name so I googled it for a few seconds, found out he was on American Idol, then remembered the drama about his sexuality. Then I realized that he was on the American Music Awards that night and just a few minutes before me seeing the status updates, he had been on stage. So after searching on Youtube for a few seconds, I found the following video:

(before you watch it though, make sure you know it has some sexually explicit images, which had to pass the Suda test :) )



In case you did not want to watch the whole thing, let me just summarize it for you. Lambert takes the stage, does some crazy dancing, one of his male dancers pretends to perform fellatio on him after which Lambert dances a while longer and then he proceeds to make out with his male keyboardist after grabbing another dancer's crotch.

Now I am not really going to try to talk about all of the issues that arose from that and why he did it. I don't want to speculate and assume things but what I will talk about is the impact it had.

Minutes after it happened, it was on Youtube, Facebook, the news and in my living room. I had put it on my roommates' walls and we were all watching it at once commenting on it.

Now I understand why he did it. If one person sent it to another three and the other three sent it to another three..well that's like...well a lot of people that saw it that night (I'm not that good at math, that's why I'm a global studies major). And if your main purpose is to put rumors at rest, get famous and have people tlaking about you, well then that's the way to do it. Go on national television, do something outrageous and you're famous.

I applaud him for his courage and for using the media to his advantage. He is now famous, not only in the U.S. but also abroad. If American Idol didn't make him famous, Facebook and Youtube certainly did.

I really do think that I have to break this cycle of getting my news from Facebook. Maybe I'll learn something about the world...Meanwhile I think I have to go check to see if someone commented on my status.