Here is a very informative and inspiring analysis of the YouTube phenomenon from a very human viewpoint:

An anthropological introduction to YouTube

This video is produced by Michael Wesch, a professor of anthropology at Kansas State University. It is long (55minutes) and unfortunately it does not have any interactive navigation tools. But it is worth seeing if you are interested in social media, Web 2.0, videoblogging and why video is such a powerful form of personal communication. The video contains numerous very interesting examples of the YouTube culture and its social, collaborative and creative successes since the launch in April 2005.

Quotes from the video:
“You are not going to convert passive consumers into active trollers on the internet.”
- Stephen Weiswasser, ABC Television, 1989

“We are moving from place-to-place connectivity to a person-to-person connectivity.”

Some interesting numbers:
The three national US TV networks (ABC, NBC, CBS)  were founded around 1948, 30 years ago.
3 networks * 60 years * 365 day/year * 24 hours per day= they have so far produced up to 1.5 million hours of programming in total during the last 30 years!
But the users of YouTube uploaded more video than that in the last 6 months only!
YouTube uploads are now around 9232 hours every day! This is equivalent to 6.5 hours of video being uploade every minute,  24 hours per day!
around 200 000 3-minute videos per day!

One major difference is of course that a vast majority of the YouTube videos are addressed at less than 100 people.

Michael Wesch is most famous for his video “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us.”, as stated on wikipedia:

“Wesch created a short video, “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us.” Released on YouTube on January 31, 2007, it quickly became the most popular video in the blogosphere and was viewed over 6 million times. Wesch has won several awards for his work with video, including a Wired Magazine Rave Award and the John Culkin Award for Outstanding Media Praxis from the Media Ecology Association.”