I can remember like it was yesterday the first time someone sent me a link to a YouTube video … wait, it was yesterday (or close to it). Can you believe YouTube is only a year and half old?

Well, that doesn’t stop Tom Scocca from the New York Observer from discussing all the ways in which YouTube is revolutionizing the way we relate not just to television, film and the web — but memory itself.

And that’s not necessarily a good thing — especially when you have viewed the visual past through rose-colored nostalgia.

(If you still haven’t run across YouTube, don’t feel bad. Just check out their about page. Scocca also does a good job of getting across what makes it so groundbreaking)

Scocca, ultimately, sees YouTube transforming moving pictures into text — or at least giving them the solidity of text:

The Internet left writers more exposed than ever. If you were published from the mid-90?s onward, you ended up in a text-based panopticon: At any time, someone, somewhere, could conceivably be reading something you had written. No longer would people have to go to the library to find old arguments and past errors. Every few months, I get an e-mail from a reader responding to something or other I wrote eight years and three jobs ago. Thanks to a retroactive Web-archiving initiative, a college intern from last summer could crack wise about something I?d written as an undergraduate myself.

Video had always been more elusive. It defeated secondhand reports; a critic might describe a scene, but the moving image was unquotable. There was no way to share that passing experience. All you could do was write about it or talk about it. The original moment was transformed by the telling into something else?probably something funnier or more original or more shocking.

But now the moments?all the moments, even the ones thought lost?have begun looping back around for public inspection. (Welcome back, Welcome Back, Kotter!) People in and on television are learning what writers have been going through. College broadcasting students? worst blunders are echoing across the Web in perpetuity. Arthur Chi?en says ?fuck? on live TV over and over; you can judge for yourself how badly he was provoked (pretty badly). You can relive the bubble-gum commercial wars of the 80?s (they even call them the bubble-gum wars on the Web). You can test which sketch-comedy shows hold up (SCTV, yes; The Kids in the Hall, not so much).

So all the “bad culture” on television, Scocca argues, is exposed for what it is.

The question is — did we really need the web and YouTube for that? It’s what good cultural critics have been doing for a long time.