UP | uncultured project

In one of the last courses I took before I left Notre Dame to start this project, I had a professor who was highly critical of the World Economic Forum.

What’s the World Economic Forum? It’s an event that happens once a year in Davos, Switzerland. World leaders, economic leaders, and prominent citizens get together to discuss the future of the world. According to this professor, the World Economic Forum was not only something to be seriously critiqued – it should be boycotted. Many people share this professor’s view and, as a counter to the World Economic Forum, have formed something called the World Social Forum. Why all the criticism of the World Economic Forum? The argument is that the World Economic Forum is too elitist, with not enough grass-roots input, and too undemocratic.

Well in 2008, thanks to YouTube, that all changed.

This year, anyone with a message to world leaders could make a video and put it on YouTube. These videos would then be rated, judged, and evaluated by other YouTube users. Anyone with an account on YouTube can go to the channel called “The Davos Question” and view and vote on which videos should be seen by the World Economic Forum members. The Davos Question was a question put forward by the World Economic Forum asking us – what do we think needs to be done by corporations, individuals, and governments to make the world a better place? The videos with the highest ratings would then be screened in the World Economic Forum. Bono, Bush, and Blair – they would all see what you had to say. All of a sudden, ordinary joes with good ideas got a voice at one of the world’s highest forums. Fancy that.

Okay…. so it’s not that simple….

The biggest problem with getting a message across – no matter how good – is dealing with haters (or “haterz”). Haters are a problem for people who get popular on YouTube. Fortunately, I haven’t run into that problem – which probably speaks to how much I am an unknown on YouTube. But, for many people trying to put good ideas forward in order to answer the The Davos Question, a lot of them are being picked apart by haters. One of my favorite videos to the Davos Question was done by a high school teacher (and fellow Canadian) by the name of Greg. He calls for greater consideration towards the global poor. As you can see in his video, he’s articulate and he makes a passionate plea.

But, after his video got popular, what do the haters have to say?

Find out after the jump.

“you are still stuppid [sic] americans, and u will always be, nothing can change that”

“kinda hard to take you seriously when you do all these ridiculous cut aways….”

“Greg I think the world will be a better place if you weren’t so self obsessed”

“WHAT A TOOL!”

Basically, when this video was relatively unknown – the comments were helping to form an intellectual debate on the pros and cons of his view. Not everyone agreed with his conception of economics – and some of the original comments were civil, critical, but were on topic. But, after it became popular, the comments degraded into a shouting festival full of uncreative insults. Moreover, a lot of people simply voted one out of five stars to lower the high rating this video had before it became popular. Negatively isn’t the problem. It’s just that trolling like this tends to add noise and makes it hard for important messages to emerge. The fact that YouTube and the World Economic Forum have created this avenue for citizens for voice their ideas is nothing short of amazing.

But haters remind me that, no matter how much potential a message has, there will be people waiting in the wings to try and drag it into the mud as much as possible. Sometimes it can just be against change itself:

“tell you what.. you demand change.. because im happy with the world”

It’s comments like this that make me glad I’ve got a small audience on YouTube.