I’ve had an amazing couple of days. So many glorious developments which lead me to be more excited about my future, and my living space and other things. And, yet, at the same time, I’ve had moments which have left me feeling disappointed and despondent. People suck. Do they? Maybe. Maybe not. Certainly my experience of other people has sucked this week.
An old fairly inconsequential YouTube video was being inundanted with not-terribly-nice comments. To be honest I didn’t really care if random people on the internet liked it or not, or thought it was clever or stupid. What concerned me was the new subtext they were reading into it, that it actually revealed me to be a chronic racist. Certainly that wasn’t my intention. The video was profoundly silly, granted, but I always felt like the only person I was making fun of was myself. The whole project was born out of nothing but love and adoration for my British friends.
It frustrated the hell out of me too because time and time again random people will come up to a particular video and go, “That didn’t solve poverty!” or “That didn’t introduce world peace!” or “That isn’t a proper sociological study of accents in the United Kingdom!” And, of course, none of my videos attempt to do any of those things. I mean whether or not you enjoy something, it is what IT is, you know? It doesn’t morph into something different just because you come at it from a particular ideology or with a particular expectation. That people were happening upon a video titled, “HAPPY FAKE BRITISH ACCENT DAY” and then complaining about how fake the accents were… it blew my mind. While I haven’t delved very deeply into the statistical information YouTube offers, I severely doubt these people were finding this video by accident. It is my expectation they sought out the information, and, somehow, still didn’t understand the nature of the beast.
At any rate I have removed the video from public viewing. I genuinely believe I hadn’t done anything offensive or wrong, but decided it probably wasn’t worth fighting for the purposes of my own convinction. But more than that, I thought, this video isn’t really what JohnOfJordan is about. In that way, it was a no brainer. I confess there have been moments when I’ve been driven crazy by a desire to connect with people and moments where I’ve equated my own personal worth to the ability to get views/comments/subscriptions. I’ve uploaded things that I wasn’t proud of because I felt compelled more by a timetable than a desire to produce quality content.
But by the same token I was very conscious that this video – regardless of whether people loved it or hated it – had really captured the imagination of a lot of people. It was getting an obscene amount of views (at least by JohnofJordan standards). And this in itself brought up a raft of psychological dilemmas. I mean, I guess I could bait a lot of people into viewing anything if I managed to be controversial or trivial enough, surely? What if Nalts is right; what if good content isn’t popular? What is the point of putting the time and energy into something truly magical if nobody cares enough to embrace it?
I didn’t end up writing very much about it, but I found YouTube Live a profoundly disappointing development. I remembered thinking at the end of it a great sense of, “Oh great, THIS is the world we now live in.” Everything seemed so horrendously contrived and pointless. Novelty was favoured over quality, and nothing was allowed to linger too long lest the ADHD generation become bored.
And I thought that perhaps this silly video was my own personal demonstration of this insight into the world that we live in.
But maybe I am too soon to pass judgment on the world. Another video from some time ago has had its own momentum, even in what has frankly been a video creating lull for me. Unlike the earlier video, this one does mean something. Infact to me it means everything. It was a labour of love and much editing. It was an attempt to dissect and assimilate my own life experience.
This was the most recent comment on the Unconditional Love video:
nsyncangel101 (1 week ago)
this is great, and all so true. i just recently came to this conclusion as well. you have a lot of guts for putting yourself out there like that, but way to make a statement!
This comment meant so much, but truthfully by this stage I was so used to meeting condescending comments with whimisical replies that all I could do was say ‘thank you.’
At any rate I feel that for me the true power of online videos isn’t about skateboarding dogs, or the ability to increase sales of mentos and diet coke. I mean those things are wonderful. But it isn’t where I want to live. It isn’t what I want to do. And if that means my videos get fewer views, so be it.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Mine, too.