The Problem with GooTube (and Inside Iran)

in Media | March 12th, 2007 1 Comment

With YouTube and Google Video now sit­ting under the same hap­py cor­po­rate umbrel­la, you can rest assured that the world will receive only a stead­ier stream of home-brewed videos of gui­tar riffs, tread­mill dances, dorm room antics, and pet play­times, the very stuff that makes up YouTube’s all-time list of favorites. Lucky us. But some­where with­in these vast troves of videos reside some valu­able cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al con­tent. And although it will assured­ly lose the pop­u­lar­i­ty con­test that deter­mines rel­e­vance with­in the world of Web 2.0, it’s there nonethe­less, and we’re hap­py to point it out, espe­cial­ly since GooTube does­n’t do much to help on that front. Here’s a good exam­ple of what we’re talk­ing about.If you take seri­ous­ly the recent polit­i­cal talk, the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion looks to be on a col­li­sion course with Iran. And should things come to a head, you can guar­an­tee that Amer­i­cans will have next to no sense of what Iran is real­ly like as a coun­try, oth­er than what the admin­is­tra­tion has to say about it. The GooTube video below is a good cor­rec­tive to that. This 90-minute live­ly pro­gram pro­duced by the BBC takes an inside look at “one of the most mis­un­der­stood coun­tries in the world, look­ing at the coun­try through the eyes of peo­ple rarely heard — ordi­nary Ira­ni­ans.” And as it goes on to explain things, “it took a year of wran­gling to get per­mis­sion to film inside Iran but the result is an amaz­ing por­tray­al of an ener­getic and vibrant coun­try that is com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent to the usu­al images seen in the media.” Take a look:


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  • Marcus says:
    April 5, 2007 at 6:42 am

    “The Bush Admin­is­tra­tion looks to be on a col­li­sion course with Iran.” Come on… In this case you can’t peg this on “the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion.” It’s Amer­i­ca, the UN and the World who are on a crash course with Iran.

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