And the mother panda’s reaction is what really sells it.

Jim is spot on: “Sometimes, the world gets so shitty and then you see a baby panda sneeze….”

I think it says something very positive about humanity that in this often dreadful world there are 20 million views of that tiny, endearing moment.

Perhaps I just don’t know of them because they have to operate in secret, given the legal conditions, but honestly I don’t anything like this exists yet.

I embrace your opinion that the mundane is sometimes our salvation. I’m just surprised at numbers approaching 20 million, because I don’t believe anywhere near 20 million individuals have watched those videos. The panda one, for instance, is only about 4 seconds long or something and thus begs a replay. Does YouTube count that as 2 plays? Or do you have to refresh the entire page for another play to be counted?

In other words, if watching a YouTube video as inane as these gives someone a little reprieve from life’s tribulations, I’m all for that. But maybe the relief they get is asymptotal and so they keep watching it again and again, never really unwinding but getting ever closer.

It does sound like I’m being judgmental—and to be fair, I almost always am—but I guess it’s just a lamentation at the lack of data here. What I can see is so freaking interesting, but then the rest is all unknowns.

Field of memetics, here I come.

That’s what’s wrong with the picture.

Sometimes, the world gets so shitty and then you see a baby panda sneeze and you think to yourself that everything is going to be OK.

Also, if you’re trying to say these things are indicating a demise of the internet, you should really think about the history of shit the internet has weathered. If you consider that there are still people who use AOL as their ISP (though I suppose they are so buffered from contact with the actual internet they don’t pose any threat), if you consider the bandwidth that is wasted every day on email forwards about Jesus, gas prices and Nigerian millionaires, if you consider the rise and fall of peer to peer networks and of so many other trends, you can’t try to say shitty Youtube videos are surprising.

I would say that Youtube is at it’s heart, amazing. It’s a repository of a many historical videos and you can learn quite a bit from some of the personal videos posted. You as an anthro major should be happy that unlike ever before, we can now have a comprehensive record of people and lifestyles at a given time in history.

You yourself said, you were looking at meme history. By next week these memes will be even further in the past and the next video of something so inane you’d rather kill yourself than watch will be posted. Actually it was probably just posted….