The Magic of...You Tube

Until last week I could count the number of times I watched a video on YouTube on my fingers. Occasionally someone would send me a link that looked interesting enough to chance it, but I have always had a preference for text over video, especially for news. With a few exceptions, I find that text news reports are more in-depth than video, plus, I can read faster than people talk, so watching videos was just a waste of my time.

Rowan has shown me a whole new world. Imagine you are 3 going on 4. Your favorite thing in the world is trains and the tracks they roll around on...but your parents only have enough room in their house for one set of tracks (let's be honest, we don't even have room for that.) You are still too young to grasp the connection between the trackball and the monitor so your previous attempts to use the computer could be classified as watching while Mom plays the game for you.

Enter the touch screen tablet, in this case an i-pad, but an android tablet would be just as good. Now that you can touch the screen directly, the connection between the pictures on the screen and your hand suddenly becomes obvious. You keep begging for Mom to open up one of those games and play it "with" you, but Mom is trying to work so, out of desperation, Mom opens YouTube on her i-pad and searches for Thomas the Train.

Bingo! Several hundred videos appear, most of which are people who are just as obsessed with trains as you are. They have set up their track and recorded themselves playing with their collections. You want to see it again, play it again? You want to see something similar? wait until it ends and try one of their suggested videos. You want to go back to that awesome one where the 6 year old boy narrated the story in German, touch the history button. Once the initial search has been put in, you don't even need your mom, except to bring you food and remind you to go potty. Who wants to go potty anyway when you have this marvelous machine? All you want to do is use the "Play Pad" and laugh and learn German, like the little boy in the video.

I'm afraid that I may have created a monster. Either that, or another Steven Spielberg. I guess we will just have to wait and see....