Getting the message out

TECHNOLOGY AND THE GOSPEL

Mennonite organizations flocking to YouTube

Mennonite Church Canada and Canadian Mennonite University (CMU) are two of the latest organizations to create their own pages on YouTube, the popular website that allows users to upload, view and share video clips.

MC Canada communications director Dan Dyck says the reason for creating a "channel" (youtube.com/ mennonitechurchca) on the popular website was to build awareness among congregations and the wider world of what the denomi-nation does.

Searching the word "Mennonites" on YouTube yields a variety of results, Dyck says, "some helpful, and some not-so-helpful. It's important to give another point of view of who Mennonites are."

Founded in early 2005 by three computer engineers, YouTube was purchased in November 2006 by Google Inc. for $1.76 billion. In January, the site accounted for three billion of the over nine billion videos viewed on the Internet, according to PCWorld.com.

MC Canada began producing videos in 2005 to distribute as DVDs through its resource centre. Dyck sees YouTube as another way to distribute the videos, which document Canadian events as well as work being done by Witness workers around the world.

Is MC Canada targeting young people with the channel? Not necessarily, Dyck says. He questions whether the videos MC Canada produce even have "the edge" necessary to appeal to a generation raised on MuchMusic and the Internet. How MC Canada uses YouTube in the future to reach out to younger people "is dependent on what strategy is developed [by MC Canada] for keeping in touch with that demographic," Dyck explains.

CMU recently developed a series of videos advertising the university. For John Longhurst, director of communications and marketing, YouTube is another way the university can reach out to potential students.

"YouTube is just one of the ways we share [the videos] with the wider world, but it's an important way," Longhurst says. His goal is to provide a variety of ways of finding information about CMU, and he believes ; "YouTube is the one [place] that most potential students would be going to anyway."

Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA) created its YouTube channel last November. Like MC Canada and CMU, MEDA uses YouTube as another way of distributing videos it is already producing for special events, churches and schools. The channel also affords MEDA ; other opportunities as well, says Ed Epp,. vice-president for resource development.

"You can make a quicker video that's not the 100 percent quality you might want to show at a presentation, but that still might interest people," Epp notes.

Although most people think of YouTube as something for young people, Epp and Dyck both note they have been approached by people 55 years old and older who say they have seen the videos on YouTube.

Given the ephemeral nature of popular culture, it is unclear that YouTube is here to stay. For the moment, however, "it's ubiquitous, it's huge," says Darryl Neustaedter Barg, associate director of media ministries at MC Manitoba. "Anyone who's using a computer on the Internet today has likely encountered YouTube."

[Sidebar]

For the moment, '[YouTube is] ubiquitous, it's huge!

[Author Affiliation]

BY AARON EPP

National Correspondent

WINNIPEG