This is a reminder to myself for tomorrow's posting, since it's a "December31st" kinda thing. Write a 'things I did in 2020', or 'lessons learned' kinda' post tomorrow, for the last day of the year. Don't forget it! That is all. Back to regular programming.
I got into a rabbit hole of youtube videos this morning, clicking the recommended channels on the less-popular channels I follow, and so on and on. Since I was doing this in incognito mode, google began recommending me all the related videos from circles completely detached from mine. And it's a whole wide world out there. It's quite insane actually.
Things I discovered. Literally everybody has youtube now, particularly since the pandemic, and they get their friends and families to check it out, do live sessions with their extended well-wishers, do reviews, and so on and so forth. Sort of like how blogging was in the mid aughts, but with video. And it's not just the rich, white or western, mostly male population of the internet here. I saw teenage girls from the Philippines reviewing random nicknaks, young men in West africa doing their book reviews, girls in india doing recipes, and reviews, and so forth. Regular people, with views in the dozens or mid-hundreds. Nothing wild. Which made me realize that everybody has a youtube channel now. And they're putting out a lot of content. They're being ignored, mostly, but it's out there. Ohh also there's a lot lot lot of verry racist and uhh 'radical' stuff too which let me to bail out of my journey.
My first response was, as it always is to anything related to modern technology: ohhh noo! How much more can people be obsessed with technology, at their personal brand, the obsession with being seen and watched, can they not just chill and do their own things, have fun with friends and family, not worry about how they're being perceived?
Then I realized, this is actually different. What if I told you that everybody was writing suddenly, a lot, about all sorts of things, and kept churning out content even if nobody cares, their own little universe of reviews and personal observations, meticulously organized and planned, edited and put together? You would congratulate me for the blog, obviously. And with youtube, it's just like that. Except it's even more work, since you need to put at least some thought on the lighting, the sound, angles, intros-outros, and organizing the videos, if you intend to have any number of viewers.
That's when it hit me. Youths from all over the world are getting free training to become amateur filmmakers, editors and sound editors, they're being taught the structure and presentation of all sorts of media in the youtube platform. By using youtube, they're learning to explore interesting topics -- they may not be unique or interesting to anybody else, but that's besides the point -- the flame of curiosity burns bright in them. They are no content with being content consumers, they want to be producers. They are not okay with just listening, they desire to be heard, and they're working towards it.
For me, that's the important part. The internet has certainly allowed for radicalisation of the youth and the elderly. But it's also made a large number of people all over realize, they can get on the tv too, with not much investment! And people want to see them! And they too can be famous, and possibly rich, with this new thing. The marketplace for attention has become global, and in that, somewhat more of a fairer playing ground. It's not just the Hollywood and the Bollywood competing for our attention anymore, it's every other person doing interesting things, innovating, to be seen. Yeah, they will most likely fail, as these things tend to do, but they will have learnt so much, when they're older, their skills will transfer into a better trained and more aware media ecosystem.
Or so we hope. If the radicalization's not let to the third world war by then, alas.
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