youTube's+Guide+to+Delinquency

YouTube's How-To Guide to Delinquency //“A simple search of "How To" videos on YouTube not only turned up helpful tips for household repairs, but also offered step-by-step instructions for breaking into that house, stealing the car, driving off without paying for gas, and even scamming a Big Mac.”// (Bonisteel, 2006)
 * Locating a suitable news item (1 mark)**

You Tube’s so called “freedom of speech” is getting out of hand as people are posting videos of illegal activities such as, breaking and entering, Misuse of illegal drugs etc. The Google owned webpage has videos of people teaching other viewers how to perform such illicit acts. Videos from a man showing you how to pick a lock, to showing how to hot wire a car and much more.
 * Present the issue (2 marks)**

YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. YouTube was created in mid February 2005, and since then, the webpage hosts over six million videos, growing at about 20 percent every month. Unregistered users can watch most videos on the site, while registered users are permitted to upload an unlimited number of videos. Some videos are available only to users of age 18 or older (videos containing potentially offensive content, pornography is disallowed to be uploaded). By making an account, for free, which does not require any source of identification, people can have any user name as they please, and can insert any birth date as they please. To upload a video, all that is need is a “YouTube” account, a video in digital format, a computer and of course, internet access. Then what you need to do is plug in your camera into your computer, and download it onto the computer. From there, you upload it on to the YouTube site which is just a click away. No one monitors the videos on the site, but relies on their users to report a video if it is not appropriate YouTube accepts video files from most digital cameras, camcorders, and cell phones in the .WMV, .AVI, .MOV, and .MPG file formats. This adds to the easy access of uploading videos onto YouTube.
 * IT Background to the issue (4 marks)**

When a video is posted on YouTube other members who watch the video can post a “reply” video to that video. The videos posted, depending on the subject of video, are likely to be people speaking on the subject and how they feel about it and/or people doing the same as they people in the original video. In this case, that is a bad thing. When I had searched the term “ how to lock pick “ on YouTube for this research, I had clicked on the first video that came up as a search term, and It had many replies to the video, of other people, learning from what the guy had done, some even correcting him. This is an impact on both the global society and the kids/adults that are being influenced by these videos. However, if YouTube was to ban and delete these videos there are also people who are using these videos in a positive way that can also impacted. Students of a certain class may need to know how to pick a lock as an experiment in class and/or teachers may want to show students how science is used in building a small bomb etc. Even your typical average person may need to find out how to e.g. pick a lock, because they lost their car keys or lost keys to any other type of lock. There is proof of this because there has been people on YouTube commenting on the videos, praising them, of how thankful they were that someone had put this video up for them top learn from or to get help out of it.
 * The Impact of the Issue (4 marks)**

-Kenneth