YouTube was created in 2005, marking the first time anyone could easily upload any video onto the web. Now, just six years later, 200,000 videos are uploaded daily. From Gary Brolsma’s infamous Numa Numa to the Star Wars Kid, YouTube is not just another website. It’s a community, and a fascinating social phenomena.

YouTube can empower, but it can also be a responsibility. Juan Mann, the founder of the ‘free hugs campaign’, now widely known, made a video apologising for not being a “good member of the YouTube community”, giving out his address so that people could stop by and chat; an extreme indication of how much the community means to him. People can now be linked in inconceivable ways from all over the world, from all walks of life. One person sitting (seemingly) alone in front of a computer is in fact part of one of the largest communities in the world.

Barry Wellman, professor of sociology at the University of Toronto believes we are “moving from place-to-place to person-to-person connectivity”. It’s a weird idea of cultural inversion; we are more and more individual yet we long for community, for authenticity in the midst of increasing isolation. We seem to have built a community through web-cams and computer screens. What’s more, you never actually know who you’re talking to. No one’s there, yet everyone’s watching (and if you’re the star of a viral video, such as Charlie and his big brother Harry, from the ubiquitous ‘Charlie bit my finger’, nearly 400,000,000 are watching); such a private space turns out to be one of the most public on the planet.

YouTube also encourages people to self-reflect. If you flick through the back-catalogue of vlogs, people at first appear to really struggle with the idea of speaking to a small camera, and then slowly become more comfortable with it: speaking to an invisible audience is an unusual concept. There are no social constraints or limitations. Likewise for the viewer, you can stare without fear of being judged as completely bizarre, or switch them off if they bore you. If you follow someone’s vlog you are able to experience them, sometimes feeling a profound connection despite never actually meeting them in person.

It also appears to be a community with very strong values – there was a phase recently of writing things on the palm of one’s hand and putting it up on YouTube. Things like ‘you are not alone’, ‘I believe in you’ and ‘love one another’ came up most – suggesting a community striving for these feelings of acceptance. They’re not as prevalent as they would wish, so they feel the need to say them. For many it makes them feel they can express themselves, their desires, the trials or tribulations of daily life, or just a feeling of unity.

Of course not all YouTube users want to share the love, and this new-found anonymity seems to bring out the wild side in a fair few of them. Novelist Lev Grossman said “Some of the comments on YouTube make you want to weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and naked hatred”.

The YouTube community provides an interesting comparison to the ideas discussed in Benedict Anderson’s book Imagined Communities, where he looks at the concept of a nation where you have no direct communication with the vast majority of other members, and yet feel a bond with them, and belong to the same community. This unity is so great some will lose their lives for it.

Anderson points at the rise of printing press during the industrial revolution as one of the important factors in this phenomenon, which draws parallels with YouTube – it allows a range of information to be circulated among a large group of people. However, this imagined community does not consolidate the feeling of a ‘nation’; to the contrary, it breaks down the idea. This is a global community, one which plays an important role (whether it be self-exploration, artistic development or just a place to let out pent-up rage) in many peoples’ lives. Perhaps people feel more connected to the YouTube community than they do to their own nation? Of the 200,000 videos released daily, 10,000 are addressed simply to ‘the YouTube community’.

So yes, it appears media does in some respect distance us, but it also connects us, and interestingly this distance allows us to connect more closely. YouTube is many things to many people; whether you want to learn Yoga, cook with Nigella, learn how to play the ukulele or sing the Numa Numa, YouTube is your community.