The program looks up the page you submit and creates a cheer from the content.

What do we use computers for? Why do we elect to network them? Does anyone actually need a web page any more than we needed a brochure? Do we need blogs more than we need to leave our diaries on the street? Is anyone actually so good at their ordinary life they need a second one? Maybe.

YouTube, like most web 2.0 innovations, allows us to strip the mental organization one would call context. This may not seem a "logical" decision but like collapsing on the couch after a long day and watching TV passively feeding our brains with "fast food" stimuli. just as we may know it isn't ideally healthy for us to have a beer but we relax and do anyway, We may choose the web not to accommodate socialness, but to filter a little out. From what? Like the autistic woman who built the hugging machine4, we may seek reassurance, but avoid too much contact with other human personalities.

There is a lot of technology and expensive tools being used simply to convey strings of text. This sort of blatantly wasteful zeal is not at all new though. The processing ability7 that makes the computer extremely distinct from a video player, is simply ignored, in favor of the world-wide-pep-rally. I'm not just ok, and you're not just ok, we are all brilliant experts8 with opinions that everyone will adopt when they understand how enlightened we are! We know that is absurd but we can clench tightly to hope.

Everyone likes encouragement, but eventually we outgrow a total dependence on it and find very personal (not social or popularity) motivations. We don't actually need constant ego (in the technical sense) reassurances, but that's really all the web, an emergent culmination of billions of (mostly happily uninformed) choices, has become.