English Audio Request

It's all happened rather fast; the children who have grown up with the phone-vids-on-Facebook culture are about five years old. At the turn of the millennium even rich middle-aged gadget guys were boasting about their massive zooms, not their multi-megapixels. It was 2001 before Sharp introduced the J-SH04, the first mobile phone with a built-in camera, 2005 when three ex-PayPal employees thought up YouTube, and, 18 months later when they sold it to Google for $1.65bn (as of last year, YouTube still hadn't reportedly turned a profit but isn't it fun?) Facebook and Twitter have only been around since 2006. This stuff is new; but, gosh, we're loving it. Or, rather, they're loving it. And they're posting videos.
Videos of themselves drinking. Videos of themselves drunk. Of themselves playing the guitar, playing the harpsichord, playing silly buggers, playing with themselves. Falling over, dressing up, mugging, doing that thing where they put their tongue out which makes me want to really, like, punch them in the face. College boys in beanies. Strangely sombre Japanese people at the seaside, pointing at giant inflatable bananas. Emo schoolkids thwacking themselves in the nadgers as they come off their skateboards. Incompetent free runners leaping from one building smack into the wall of another building. That kind of thing.
It's called "Lifecasting". "Organise and Enjoy!" encourages the webpage – Flash video of course; you'll have gone off the whole idea by the time the page loads – for FlipShare; "Create it Yourself! More than Video! Share Privately! World Premieres! Show-on-the-Go! Home Movie Night!"
What the hell happened to irony? What happened to all those Punch cartoons predicated on the – unarguable, back then – idea that the nadir of human existence was looking at your friends' holiday movies/slides/photographs? How is it that something which was once the marker of a staid and suburban middle-aged lunacy – the quiet sort, as though its practitioners had grown a sort of woolly bobble hat inside their skulls – has become a staple of youth culture?