From BoingBoing:

User uploads to YouTube have hit one hour per second – that is, sixty hours per minute. It’s a testament to how much latent expression there is in the world, waiting for a distribution platform to make it possible to share it. Before you dismiss this with the shibboleth about YouTube being nothing but illegal footage of copyrighted works and trivial footage of kittens, consider this, an excerpt from a book I’m working on at the moment:

A common tactic in discussions about the Internet as a free speech medium is to discount Internet discourse as inherently trivial. Who cares about cute pictures of kittens, inarticulate YouTube trolling, and blog posts about what you had for lunch or what your toddler said on the way to day-care? Do we really want to trade all the pleasure and economic activity generated by the entertainment industry for *that*? The usual rebuttal is to point out all the “worthy” ways that we communicate online: the scholarly discussions, the terminally ill comforting one another, the distance education that lifts poor and excluded people out of their limited straits, the dissidents who post videos of secret police murdering street protesters.

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