When I first heard about it, the idea of a YouTube convention seemed a bit odd. My interaction with the video-sharing site has been noticeably one-sided since I first discovered some obscure Tom Waits footage on it during a random Google search a couple years ago: in sort, I just watch the thing. I mean I haven’t bothered to upload any of those old Saturday Night Live performances I recorded to VHS back in the day, and I’m not one to test out amateur sketch comedy routines — lots of other folks are way ahead of me on those fronts.

 

But YouTube’s slogan is, after all, “Broadcast Yourself ™,” which makes it sort of a de facto video confessional that allows anyone to beam their personalities into the lives of an infinite number of strangers. And for those who use it as such, the opportunity to gather at the Ontario Science Centre this past Saturday for the 888 YouTube Meet-Up (so designated for the date of Friday night’s kickoff party 8.8.08) was impossible to pass up. In some circles, the 888 YouTube meet up is a far, far better thing than the Grammys, the AVN Expo and the red carpet runway at the Oscars all rolled into one. People came from as far away as Australia, Buenos Aires and Reading, England just to mingle with fellow YouTube celebrities.

 

I arrived at the Science Centre curious about that last bit. What exactly designates a YouTube celebrity? The light saber kid? Tay Zonday? Obama Girl? Sure, these people are household names, but they are more or less sideshow curiosities. The real stars are those who take the time to register elaborate screen names, like “canadian studmuffin” and “expressomax” and persistently upload original content.

 

“Expressomax” is actually the first person I meet when I make my way up to the second floor and try to suss out the 500 or so Tubers gathered for the day’s events. He stands out instantly — a 6'2"-ish man in a black cape with his face painted green and yellow, towering over the army of younger technocrats. I discover that he’s in costume as his alter ego, Mo the Mime Who Speaks (video below!), and he’s here from Pennsylvania. He says he’s already run into at least 12 different people from all over that he “knows” through YouTube.  

Meeting Mo gives me a boost of confidence as it becomes clear that there won’t be any sort of A-list snobbery in this gathering. People are here to meet people (duh, it’s a meet-up) and seem to have no problem spieling about whatever it is that they do on the other side of the LCD teat.

 

Off to one side of the room, there’s a table where people are writing, "Subterranean Homesick Blues"-style, on white signs and being photographed by a young man in a motorized wheelchair. This is “ghostwise” (a.k.a. Chris Binkowski) and the placards are part of an ongoing project called Snap Thoughts. His mom explains that he has muscular dystrophy and the project is just one of the many artistic endeavors he creates with his video camera and computer. They had a huge response to the project at the first YouTube meet-up (777) last year at Union Square in NYC, right across the river from another numerically designated mass gathering. (And in the home base of some other, recently profiled, YouTube celebrities.)  

 

Another Tuber who attended 777 was the Science Centre’s own videographer Kathy Nicholaichuk: “videochick770.” The Science Centre has been uploading to YouTube since 2006, but being at 777 was so stimulating and mind-blowing that when she got back she thought, why couldn’t they do something right here? With the sheer number of people exposing their creativity, Kathy says it’s “sort of like a Pride parade, only different.”

 

Soon it’s time for the day’s main event: the talent show. Hosted by Canadian super YouTube celeb Corey Vidal (seriously, his channel has almost 10,000 subscribers and his videos have been viewed 5.6 million times), the talent show is mainly Vidal chatting with some of those with big subscriber counts and letting people demonstrate their YouTube talents in front of an audience. These proceedings aren’t nearly as interesting as talking one on one with people, save for a cute song by Miley Cyrus-obsessed Dave Days (video below) and a few words about the first ever charity organization to come out of the YouTube universe. But you can quickly get a sense of just how popular some of these personalities are by the sometimes overwhelming crowd reaction. Seriously, I started to feel vaguely un-cool in my constant state of obliviousness.  

Just prior to the talent show, the Science Centre’s Daily Experience director Kevin Von Appen suggested that the social networking aspect of YouTube is actually the secret heart of its success. There’s lots of great and bad video, he explained, but the connections are what make it happen. He says the fact that a technology that didn’t even exist three years ago has undergone such rapid and complex evolution is similar to the kind of innovation and collaboration that the Science Centre itself has been promoting. What’s amazing is that YouTube does so seemingly without any kind of institutional encouragement.

The only unsettling part about the whole experience was the number of video cameras floating around in the crowd, indiscriminately shooting at anything and everything like a bunch of Kentucky wild boys at a gin-soaked hunt camp. Everywhere you turned: rows of viewfinders capturing the show, people recording other people doing on-camera interviews and not a second of the proceedings left undocumented. I have a sneaking suspicion my one-sided interaction with YouTube has now been permanently inverted.

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