Video programming.

A Lecturer in Media and Communication studies at the Queensland University of Technology (Brisbane) told the national newspaper The Australian (Surry Hills) on March 19, 2007 that there is talk among media watchers of the end of television.

Specifically, websites such as YouTube, which is a video forum for sharing personal programming, is changing the power relationships between traditional producers and the established video production process, and consumers of video programming.

According to The Australian story, "What we are seeing is a fundamental shift in the model of consumption that grew out of the industrial revolution." The prevailing "one-way value chain from production through distribution to consumption," is being eroded. Traditional programming distribution is changing because the newer forms of personal networking are no longer dependent on or controlled by corporate based producers and distributors.

Traditional modes of production and distribution are relics of the industrial revolution. The information revolution supports more of a "collaborative, participatory mode."

Clearly, there is something different going on in the nearly instantaneous success of the YouTube videos to which many millions are drawn on a regular basis. The appeal is strong-especially when measured against the tenacity of Australian viewers who persist in spite of the, "Scandalous problem of Australia's slow broadband speeds."

This explosion of personal expression is dependent on the convergence of the accessibility and ubiquity of the Internet; the increasing availability of broadband throughout the world, and especially in Asia; the development of relatively inexpensive, microphones, video cameras and phones; video editing software, and a concurrent loosening of previously rigid taboos in regard to a generalized voyeurism.

It is hard not to notice that well before the means were delivered into the hands of nearly every middle class consumer, television itself began to ride the crest of the newly acceptable voyeurism in the form of reality television.

Was YouTube even possible without the foundation provided by reality television?

In the 1960s the media analyst Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase, "The Global Village." Now the connectedness of village life is beginning to break down barriers to a true commerce among all the hagglers in our market economies.

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