Some Videos Aren't This Good

Over the last year and a bit, I've spent plenty of time browsing for column topics. Some days, I stumble across a video that's just cool, and then struggle to come up with something to add to your viewing experience. This is one of those videos. I just love it.

But as I watch the vid for the fifth time, I'm thinking about what it's like to be educated online. You see, this is a school project by Bang-yao Liu, a student at the Savannah College of Art and Design, and it isn't the first viral hit to emerge from the classroom. Social media distribution has opened up tech classes. Students who 10 years ago would have worked in a vacuum can now enter the public sphere as a creator almost immediately.

Obviously, this helps the most impressive students build their careers. But what about the rest of us?

For every viral phenomenon, there are thousands of mediocre video projects languishing on YouTube at under 200 views, and the odd truly embarrassing or offensive effort that will no doubt stick around the Internet archives, haunting its older and wiser creator for decades. It never used to be this way. Before most of our lives were recorded online, school assignments vanished with each year's grades, and uncovering them took a historian, not five minutes with any web browser.

As pleased as I am to have been introduced to Liu's early efforts, I'm not convinced this new reality is a blessing, especially for students creating more political, controversial work. What if Pierre Trudeau's fascist phase had been chronicled online, instead of buried and rediscovered years after his death? I do not think Canada would be better off.

This dilemma isn't confined to video art. Yesterday, I graduated from university. It's the first day of the rest of my life. But you wouldn't know that from Google because just about everything I have ever written as a journalist-in-training is easily accessible online. I wish I could edit some of it, like that first contrarian opinion piece that Googles higher than anything I've written before or since. But on balance, I think I'm better off for my public education -- the big audience and instant feedback means that I'm way less intimidated by the working world than most of my classmates. Still, Google CEO Eric Schmidt has joked that at 21 we should all be allowed to change our names and start over. Might I suggest 25?

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