A friend directed me to this week’s online star of voyeurism and exhibitionism: youtube.com. At YouTube, the mantra is “Broadcast Yourself,” and the people have responded in force. In my first few minutes on the site, I watched someone’s baby turtle begging for food, a lame attempt by a group of teenagers to make it look like they had packed themselves in a photo booth, a guy doing a Gilligan's Island beat-box, and a 10-second video of a woman shaking a bowl of Jell-O.

But when I searched for the term “Iraq” and came up with tons of videos –some picture slideshows, some propaganda from all sides, some farces – my interest was piqued. Many of the presentations are an odd mix of real footage and pictures from the ground, set to musical narratives that give insight into the creators. Of course, not all the footage may be authentic (seems like there is no way to know, although some of the MySpace links may lead us to the authors), but as you watch more and more of these you begin to find a narrative about the war that is not imposed by either the government or network television. And for a war that has been obsessively filtered through a PR lens, some of these images may be the best we can get of life on the ground, filtered only through each creator’s understanding of his/her experience.

A sampling: Marine Battalion picture slideshow with Kanye West background, feels very Jarhead

Footage of an Iraqi street from a convoy

Apparently a woman’s footage of her husband packing for Iraq (I hear a Korea reference, but maybe he goes there after Iraq?)

Humvee-skating

The Greenwald Uncovered film (this has been up since Feb. 16 – I’m surprised it’s been up this long, because it is surely flaunting copyright laws)

Claims to be photos and footage from Abu Ghraib, April 2005, set to Evanescence (the comments on this one are volatile)

Images of a year-long tour by a guy named Stan, Counting Crows soundtrack