"ATTENTION SEEKING WHORES, REALLY"

Happy birthday to YouTube, which recently celebrated its fifth anniversary. According to the video site's official blog, this birthday coincides with an important milestone: it now lures over two billion views a day, nearly double the prime-time audience of the three top American television networks combined, the site swiftly adds.

YouTube is sometimes hounded for being the natural product of all of our most craven instincts. Instead of watching quality programming on television, say, we are all narcissistically posting videos of our dancing babies and puking cats in the hopes of becoming famous. Though Joel Budd at The Economist makes a convincing case for television's sustained hegemony, it's clear that something more interesting is going on here. The promise of an audience is enough to motivate most anyone to take out a camera and capture something (Anne Trubek made a similar argument for blogging and writing). People are creating work and engaging with each other. The result is that everyone becomes a producer, not just a consumer—something that Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink consider in this insightful conversation in the latest issue of Wired.

Peter Oakley is fairly persuasive himself: