In aggregate and when looked at a higher level, the content on YouTube can be seen as a joint project between many creators and many viewers. This is fundamentally different from Television production, which is produced by a few and consumed by many.

All this argues that YouTube is not Television. What about Joost?

Perhaps we can tackle the answer by changing the viewpoint to that of the impact of television.

In particular, is TV a technology? Or a social mechanism, sharing values and communal identity? Or is it a means of propagating memes, that we freely use to construct our collective, yet individualized identities?

And if it’s all of the above, what changes when that mechanism for disseminating, embedding and imbuing culture, shared concepts and ideas becomes de-centralized, and “tweakable”?

Does anything change? What happens to the memes – do they become richer?

Do we ourselves become richer through more personalization? Or, more diluted, perhaps?

With TV 2.0, some means of aggregation of the collective impressions, consumption, and co-creation of the medium are likely to elevate it from a unidirectional source to… something different.

In complex systems theory, small individual inputs can lead to large variations in the global system.

When traditional “viewers” become co-creators – at first through free meta-data generation and aggregation, and then perhaps more broadly – the very nature of the medium is bound to change.

i;m in ‘content creation [or] production’, a phrase very much in question.

here’s another? is is ironic

To be serious, I would say new media is best defined by:

1. New means and methods of content distribution.
2. Non-traditional productions (aka ‘user generated’ and/or ‘hegemonically apolitical’).
2. Instant return path.