When Time Magazine placed a mirror on its cover for its Person of the Year issue in 2006, it reflected more than just one’s face – it reflected the idea that user-generated content is shaping politics and entertainment more than ever before.

The culprit of this new digital democracy: YouTube.

With the growing popularity of online videos, it’s a wonder people haven’t classified the digital entertainment realm into specific genres until now.

International Communica-tions professor Anandam Kavoori has stepped up to the task and will present a method of categorizing YouTube this Friday.

“If you try to count the videos and look at the numbers of people watching, it’s not like television where you can turn it on and there is a certain number of shows that are playing every hour,” he said. “I’m trying to get to how people use [YouTube].”

Kavoori has come up with several different ways the site is used. Citing the “YouTube Phenomenon” as the most important category, Kavoori said these videos are the ones watched by millions of people for pure entertainment. Some of the most famous are Chocolate Rain, Numa Numa and the Star Wars Kid videos.

“The Witness,” however, may be the most influential and life-altering genre of YouTube. In these videos, someone records an event and posts it online.

“Somebody was there at Saddam Hussein’s hanging with a cell phone and actually recorded it. It became a huge phenomenon internationally,” said Kavoori.

Kavoori tackles the question of whether or not YouTube will eventually replace television and broadcast news.

“I think that YouTube right now has a function of working with mass media, but eventually online entertainment will … improve and maybe replace all mediums,” he said. “I think online media is inherently democratic. That doesn’t mean it’s enlightened or insightful all the time, however.”

Though CNN has featured it before, YouTube functions more as a source of entertainment than it does a news resource.

“I think, broadly speaking, that people use YouTube more for entertainment, but I don’t think it uses that kind of typology to really organize itself,” Kavoori said.

So is YouTube’s future aimed at education or amusement?

“Though YouTube has tremendous potential for education and democratic participation, it seems all people want to do is watch kittens play and Miss Teen USA forget her ABCs,” said media scholar Roger Stahl. “It is not an entirely free place. There’s censorship and copyright issues, and it’s controlled by a corporation [Google] with its own commercial interests.”

Both Stahl and Kavoori said it’s difficult to predict YouTube’s impact on our culture.

“It has infinitely multiplied the number of ‘channels’ available, it serves as an enormous archive of material, it has shifted the ‘means of production’ into the hands of the everyday person, it has fragmented culture, it has transformed politics, and it has made us think about culture in terms of swarms, clouds and viruses,” said Stahl.