[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Sometimes it seems as if the Internet offers little but a series of echo chambers where like-minded people fulminate among themselves. But there is one gigantic forum that is a virtual free-for-all, especially when it comes to one of the hottest topics of the day -- God. That forum, of course, is YouTube. In this weekend's New York Times Magazine, Virginia Heffernan focuses not on the most viewed YouTube clips, but on the ones that generate the most comments.

Some are what you'd expect, kind of dumb. For instance, this is the second most discussed clip in which a YouTuber named Chris Crocker rages over the media's treatment of Britney Spears.
CHRIS CROCKER:
[LAUGHS] What you don't realize is that Britney's making you all this money and all you do is write a bunch of crap about her. Leave Britney alone!
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
The comments on that clip mostly mock the emotional Britney fan. But the number one most commented on video is this one.
[CLIP]:
[WAFA SULTAN SPEAKING IN ARABIC]
[END OF CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
It's Wafa Sultan, with subtitles, on Al Jazeera, discussing what she calls "the backwardness of Islam." Virginia Heffernan explains that the conversation that's grown out of that clip is pretty sophisticated.
VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN:
That's a video that has prompted 200,000 comments -- and counting. If you read that commentary, you get a sense that these YouTubers are not interested in music videos, they're not interested in the cat videos that get laughed at all the time or the skateboard crashes. They are interested in trying to figure out whether, in this case, Samuel Huntington's thesis about the clash of civilizations has any merit or not.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
When there are 200,000 comments for one clip, is there any way for a conversation to emerge, or is it really just an avalanche of responses?
VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN:
The comments that follow some of the most-viewed videos are often just oneliners. Someone will write, this is funny, or, wow. But the comments on The Truth about Islam from an Ex-Muslim Lady are dominated by very carefully-composed paragraphs by characters -- I think of them as characters because I've read most of the 200,000 comments, and they have real personality -- characters who keep coming back to the conversation, to keep fighting, basically [LAUGHS], keep arguing with other commenters. And essentially a narrative emerges, disputes and alliances among the people who want to talk about Islam and the future of civilization.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
But would you say that the level of discourse is high, or would you say it's like any discourse on YouTube -- low, middle and high?
VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN:
I would definitely say low, middle and high. I mean, what it brought to mind for me is sort of eighteenth century disputes. If you think about the way Pope and Dryden would talk, on the one hand, in very bawdy terms about the -–
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
I think about it all the time.
VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN:
[LAUGHS] All right. Well, I'm a dork, but --
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
[LAUGHS]
VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN:
-- that is something that it brought to mind here. So they talk in like, this kind of phony grandiloquence -- these are the YouTubers -- this very high tone. I don't even know what to associate it with. Heavy metal? It's sort of like Spinal Tap or something. And then they dip into, you know, just invective, these people call each other zygotes and they call [LAUGHS] each other fetuses, and they have these like ,these, I don't know, very pointed kind of criticism that doesn't turn up other places in popular culture.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And we should point out that a lot of these responses are not in text. This being YouTube, people can upload video responses. Here's one response to the much-discussed clip titled Atheism.
MAN:
Salutations. I believe I have found the Achilles heel of atheism.
[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
Okay, I had talked about Kant's criticism of the ontological proof of God's existence. I went through Anselm to Descartes, and I talked about Hume's criticism. Now I want --
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Do you think this adds another level of depth to the back and forth, or is it just really people reading what they would otherwise just have written in a comment?
VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN:
Just like the commenters pay a lot of attention to how they craft their comments and responses, in the video responses people are even more attentive to form -- how their title cards come up and how they edit their videos. We've all studied commercials and movie trailers for a long time, so people want to try their hand at essentially what is making propaganda.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
In your piece, you also took a look at explicitly religious analogs to YouTube, notably GodTube. Was the nature of the conversation on GodTube very, very different, because the people likely to be reading it and using it are more homogeneous?
VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN:
Yeah. [LAUGHS] GodTube does nothing if not preach to the converted. GodTube's slogan is "Broadcast Him" and if you're looking at the site itself, people are posting videos say of a little girl reciting Psalm 23 in a kind of cute way or some excerpts from sermons.

And the comments —- they'd never disagree with the content of what's in the clip -- but a lot of users of GodTube want to discuss which videos are most effective, the same things that people would, might talk about on Madison Avenue or in Hollywood: how do you sell God in short videos.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So this is about tactics and strategy, not about theology or belief.

VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN:
That's exactly right. One of the filmmakers who's become sort of a face of GodTube says that he could have gone to work for Hollywood, but he wanted to put his skills as a videographer to work for God, for his religion, and that creating videos, that, once again, are like propaganda videos, were what he was called to.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
We often hear that the Internet may ultimately end up as just a series of cells, a series of unconnected echo chambers where people can never hear an idea that they didn't already embrace.

But you have a place like YouTube where it seems you can either throw stones or you can pull up a chair. In other words, you can actually have that accidental encounter with people who don't agree with you. Do you think that this speaks to a different potential future for the Internet, after all?
VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN:
I think YouTube is an incredibly exciting development that is very much against the kind of stratification that you discuss, where people will simply remain with their own, the kind of thing you see happening on Facebook a little bit, where you only ever have to talk to friends or friends of friends, at worst.

YouTube, it's a sort of metropolitan idea of, you know, that you'll really run into and discover a friction with people who are very unlike you. Part of what's amazing about it is because YouTube uses a visual language, you can even have discussions via video with people with whom you literally don't have a common language. For instance, one of the most widely-discussed videos is something with an entirely Turkish name that I won't try to pronounce, but the images it shows are cartoons. They're anti-Islam cartoons, and they are legible, even to me. So working with icons, working with spectacles from nature, people make cases and arguments that are amazingly readable, even if you don't share a language with the uploader.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Virginia, thank you very much.
VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN:
Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Virginia Heffernan writes a column called “The Medium” in The New York Times Magazine.