Bilal Hashmi talks about the possibilities, meanings and limitations of YouTube™ as a repository of global culture(s) and language(s).
As I sit down to write these fleeting remarks on YouTube and multilingualism, I cannot help but ponder about of the thin layer of dust accumulating on top of my television set. It is not so much the case that content broadcast on mainstream television these days has lost its former appeal - that would be far from the truth. But as someone who has a profound interest in popular culture, but rarely the time or motivation to sit through hours of someone else’s programming, I turn almost ritualistically to YouTube on what I must shamelessly admit is a regular basis.
The most fascinating characteristic of YouTube in my view has been its ability to gather images, text and sounds from various parts of the world, in numerous languages. In the “Most Viewed” section of the website, it is not uncommon for you to come across - on any given day - an array of diverse clips ranging from American music videos to Taiwanese soap operas, from Turkish elections to footage from German soccer matches. Needless to say, scintillating content always tops the list.
And then, of course, there are the accompanying user comments, wherein one finds members of the community discussing, translating and occasionally expressing bewilderment over the posted content. Consider the following exchange, which I reproduce here from memory, but variations of which I have encountered numerous times:
UserX: What do these words mean? Post your videos in English!
UserY: We all have to learn English. Why can’t you learn Spanish?
This is not to suggest that an official policy of diversifying language content be put in place - such a maneuver would be devastating to the spirit of this otherwise laudable forum, the guiding philosophy behind which (”Broadcast Yourself”) is to post just about anything within more or less reasonable constraints. Any such change would need to arise from within the community itself, a significant portion of which does not speak English as a first language.
It would be a great pity and a terrible lack of imagination on our part if travelers in cyberspace were bound by the same rules as those in the “real” world.
These brief and scattered reflections on the specter of multilingualism in just one manifestation of cyberculture will undoubtedly appear to some as parochial, or even misleading. They are parochial to the extent that YouTube as a global phenomenon is just a little over two years old; they are potentially misleading because there is no such thing as a monolithic “cyberculture”, but rather, cybercultures.
