Apparently You Tube is the UK’s most watched video source outside of the BBC. Which is interesting, as I find myself watching You Tube videos less and less. Ok, I know I’m not one of those ‘young people’ who, according to the media, consume all of their video content via their mobile phone and won’t watch anything more than thirty seconds long, but I still find this latest non-story less than believable. In fact, I take anything in the established media about the supposed viewing habits of the ‘young’ with a very large pinch of salt. For one thing, it’s always written by a bunch of knee-jerk reactionary old fogeys whose entire existence is dependent upon the existence of ‘old media’, so they naturally spend their time coming up with alarmist stories about this new fangled online media. Moreover, like many people of a certain age and conservative views, they inevitably hate the young as they listen to strange and different music, watch weird TV shows and play violent video games, (completely ignoring the fact that, back in the day, their parents’ generation said many of the same things about them, doubtless substituting watching ‘video nasties’ for playing video games). On top of all that, most of these claims about ‘young people’ and the web are based upon highly dubious surveys of what are supposedly ‘typical’ samples of young people who may, or not, be representative of all young people. Probably not, I’d venture.
But getting back to the point, these claims about You Tube make me sceptical as my own You Tube viewing habits have followed the opposite pattern. My viewing of stuff on there has been in decline for quite a while now due, in part, to several of the content makers whose stuff I enjoyed producing fewer videos and in larger part due to the fact that I find the majority of people still making content, even in the areas that interest me, superficial and seemingly interested less in their subject matter and more in promoting themselves. It’s all just become far too self-obsessed, with content makers spending far too much time onscreen themselves promoting their own opinions and producing very shallow content.
Sure, I know that you have to be egocentric, to a degree, in order to want to produce content, (I speak from personal experience of churning out stuff here on The Sleaze), but it seems to have reached an extreme in some parts of the net, as people battle for clicks, likes and followers, seeking the remote adulation of a fickle fanbase. I mean, I watch a fair few model railway videos but find it increasingly difficult to avoid those where the maker is putting themselves as some kind of ‘personality’ and ‘expert’ on the subject. Damn it, I just want to watch videos of model trains! Now, I have to reiterate that I’m not one of those ‘young people’ and that my viewing habits might well not be typical even for my demographic, but I suspect that, regardless of age, I’m not alone in my growing disenchantment with this whole You Tube ‘Cult of Personality’.
But it isn’t just You Tube that I feel this way about. I find myself increasingly disengaged from social media. Again, maybe it’s my age, but I increasingly go through my various feeds and find myself asking why I’m following all these self-promoters and realising that, quite frankly, I have no interest in hearing their opinions on anything. Which sounds hypocritical, I know, as I type this in preparation to post it on a public site, expecting random people to read it. Indeed, I find myself increasingly asking myself why I still create content and put it out there. I mean, why should anyone be remotely interested in anything I do or say? What right do I have to try and impose my opinions and ideas upon others? I always come back to the same answer: I do it because I just need to get these ideas out of my head, to stop them from rattling around in there and moulding them into satirical form is the best way to do this. Does it matter if anyone actually reads (or listens in the case of the podcasts I do over at Onsug) to any of it? In fact, the reality is that all of us are just shouting into the void these days, with search engines, especially Google, seeming to be doing their best to prevent anyone from finding original web content. But that won’t stop those who see platforms like You Tube as their chance to be somebody.
Which is the underlying problem here: most of the trouble in the world seems to be the result of people trying to be somebody. Politics, in particular, are full of the likes of Trump, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, whose main motivation for seizing and wielding power seems to be feed their own weak egos and as we’ve seen, self aggrandisement does not make a good basis for policy formulation. The subjugation of that ego is they key – we all need to accept that the overwhelming majority of us are simply nothing special. If only the would be dictators and so called online influencers (whose influence is inevitably malign) could learn to accept that they are actually nobody, I’m sure that they’d be a lot happier. After all, there’s nothing wrong in being nobody – it’s what most of us are. Speaking personally, I found greater inner peace when I embraced the fact that, far from being someone special, I’m just another insignificant person living an insignificant life who will, likely, never achieve anything of significance, (not to the wider world, at least). Once you accept that you are nobody, it really takes the pressure off, you can get off that treadmill of always feeling obliged to prove your specialness to the rest of the world. If only all those characters on You Tube could grasp, as I have done, that it doesn’t matter how many, if any, people consume your content, that high views and likes doesn’t validate its quality, then maybe, just maybe, they’d start making some interesting content.
