The European Commission has long been good at keeping up with new web tools as it strives to raise awareness of its many activities – Commissioner Wallström’s blog and RSS feeds on pretty much every page on its massive site are testimony to this. They’ve now gone even more “Web 2.0” by setting up a dedicated channel on YouTube – euTube – to make its audiovisual material, including short videos on all sorts of things from road safety to immigration; and nanotechnology to human rights, more easily available
The channel has so far proved popular. One entry in particular, on European film, which includes sex scenes from a variety of award-winning European films has been viewed over 3 million times already (2nd most popular entry has about 300,000). As ever, sex sells. Not that everyone is happy about it. The League of Polish Families, that truly forward-thinking bastion of modernity, has claimed the video is immoral; while, surprise-surprise, the UK Independence Party has said it’s tacky, and a waste of tax-payers’ money.
There has not been much real opposition though (i.e. from respectable parties or organisations whose members and supporters tend to be literate). Most people presumably think what we think: it’s amusing; putting together a couple of video clips and uploading to YouTube hardly amounts to a fortune snatched from destitute British tax-payers (or God-fearing Polish farmers for that matter); who cares; and in any case, if it leads some people who might otherwise never have found euTube to entries on climate change and humanitarian aid, surely it’s worth it?
