The Many Tribes of YouTube

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN The New York Times May 27, 2007

WHAT do you think of the latest video on YouTube? Wait. Don't answer that, or at least don't answer with words. Because almost the instant you start to talk about one of the beautiful, puzzling videos that pervade the site that Google acquired last fall for $1.65 billion, you reveal that you're missing the point. Really the only authentic response to a YouTube video is another YouTube video -- the so-called "video response."

YouTube appeared in February 2005, when it was modestly billed as a site on which people could swap personal videos. Since then, however, its video-response feature, which essentially allows users to converse through video, has managed to convene partisans of almost every field of human endeavor, creating video clusters that begin with an opening video, and snowball as fans and detractors are moved to respond with videos of their own. In answer to a lousy, stammering video, say, a real YouTuber doesn't just comment, "You idiot -- I could do that blindfolded!" He blindfolds himself, gets out his video-capable Canon PowerShot and uploads the results.

There are music-making videos about music, dance videos about dance, and architecture videos about architecture. Music people respond to musical performances by filming a musical performance of their own. The same principle holds for dancers, athletes, pundits, pedants, comedians, film editors, poets, stunt people, propagandists and showoffs of every stripe.

What's more, YouTube's interface allows users to track the history of anything they watch, as well as to pursue video responses to it. As a further inducement to stay on the site, YouTube proposes a half-dozen works that might interest you whenever you're streaming a video.

When you enter the site, then, be warned: before you know it, you've entered one of YouTube's great unmarked communities -- the shred guitarists, the torch singers, the Christopher Walken impersonators. Each community is filled with so many small obsessive pursuits colliding and colluding with one another that it's awfully tempting to skip your lunch break -- or take the day off -- and watch them all.

What follows, then, is not a list of the top videos on YouTube. That would be too simple, too old-Web. Instead, here are five of the most fascinating worlds to get lost in on YouTube. Every single one of them is worth a detour.

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