I’ve started a new YouTube channel, JohnLaceyTV. This isn’t the first additional YouTube channel I’ve started, infact it’s not even the first YouTube channel I’ve started to feature my real name. I wanted to take a moment to explain to you (and myself) why I have started it, why I am using it, and why I’ll continue to use my other account too.

I have JohnLacey.com and JohnLacey.net. This is slightly confusing, but there are reasons for this. Some of them relate purely to my own vanity (being frustrated to discover I’m one of a billion John Laceys on the planet and wanting to try to own the name online). Some of them were practical, logistical… I only registered JohnLacey.net initially because I was moving all my sites and wanted a new email address to use with all my online accounts. There is an element of link building involved too. And these things are all… well, they are what they are, I suppose. But they’re not really that important.

The real difference, in my eyes, is the function of the two sites. And the content. This is my personal blog. This is a dumping ground for random thoughts. I joke that I’d close down my ‘personal blog’ except “where would all my existential angst end up then?” And this is true. JohnLacey.com is obstensibly a professional site for someone who has shunned professional life. I voluntarily left the work force to explore some whims I have. But on that site I write about writing, about wanting to write, I write about creativity, I collect interesting quotes from people I admire. There is a creative focus there because I want to be a creative person. I’ve been trying to express this sentiment for a long time and every time I do the words ‘lofty’ and ‘ambitions’ come to mind. At times I can’t begin to imagine what an artist is or does, but I know I want to be one. I know this when I watch Sunday Arts in awe and with a degree of envy. I watch people make sculptures and paint and draw, and I think… ‘wow, this is amazing!’

And then there is JohnOfJordan.com… This is about YouTube and community. Not about ‘the community’ really, so much as about ‘my community.’ I interview my friends about their hopes and dreams and video technique. I include tips and thoughts and ocassionally a video of my own. The point I want to make is that I never had any desire to become a video maker. I wasn’t one of the drama kids in high school. I hadn’t done any acting since the primary school play Nowhere Boy (where I was given an important supporting role until the moody director, hell bent on living his dreams through school children, recast my role and made me an extra). My attraction to this site was all about people and not the ‘famous’ people waving down from their ivory towers, but the people who were just like me somewhere else in the world sharing their lives, sharing their world, sharing themselves. (And I suppose this is what people like Rohan and Christopher Mast mean when they talk about YouTube being a “social networking site.”) I’ve come to enjoy video production and be deeply fascinated by it, but it was always in service of connecting with people and people I cared about.

But still those ‘lofty ambitions’ hover. Still that artistic aspiration exists deep within me. JohnOfJordan is community directed, and that is what I love about it. But I guess I started JohnLaceyTV so I had a forum where I could be more self-directed. A place where I could be myself, under my own name, and perhaps shed some of the YouTubian concerns I had fostered with JohnOfJordan. It is oddly liberating to start again, to start from scratch. Working on a video that I’m proud of and putting it on a channel four people have heard of makes me think about the work, the art, more than the views… (I think viewers of either will appreciate content that is collected slightly thematically too.)

I always felt this great pressure to ‘be’ one thing and to be ‘the best’ of that one thing. I struggled with that idea for a really long time, because everyone is an ‘expert’ and everyone thinks you should be an ‘expert’ too. And not just an expert but ‘the’ expert. And for me the most rewarding thing has been not choosing between competing desires, but finding a way to explore as many of them as I can. It is about trying to honour all of the pieces of me.

YouTube Australia is an odd creature. Because there are apparently so few people consistently creating video content in Australia there seems to be an expectation that those few people should become ‘best friends forever’ and sit around campfires together toasting marshmallows and singing Kum Ba Ya. You need not be an expert in human psychology to appreciate that human interaction just doesn’t work that way. You wouldn’t expect someone to follow and befriend (in the more tradition sense of the word) everyone in America producing videos on a semi-regular basis, would you? Of course not. That would be insane. Again the reason relates to quantity.

If you don’t believe me, check out my garden gnome’s channel. No, really. Its a video channel hosted by a garden gnome. It’s not a troll account, not a sock account, it’s a gnome account! This gnome with a whopping four subscribers has the following dubious honour:

#36 – Most Subscribed (This Month) – Gurus – Australia

I was happy, overjoyed even, that I got to hang out with a more select group of YouTube people recently. These people actually were my friends. But the point I really want to make here is that these relationships are meaningful because they are based around more than a shared nationality and a single hobby. Relationships are connections entrenched in familiarity, shared values, interests and dreams. Not merely demographics. That is the ‘old skool’ marketing view of the world – an expectation that all males 25-30 residing in Australia will all fall over themselves to snap up your product. My hope is that people have a more innate understanding that individuals are more than the raw data on their birth certificates.

@retrogrrl on Twitter brought this fascinating article from 43folders.com to my attention. The whole article is worthy of your consideration, however a single tweet encapsulated the central idea:

Apparently, you should pretend to like anyone who pretends to like you. This is called “networking,” and it’s why the web smells like feet.
- hotdogsladies

We know instinctively when people are being disingenuous. This is why we abhor the concept of Sub4Sub. Personally I realise now that I was trying too hard to ‘play nice’ and ‘fit in’ with certain people who were more acquaintances than friends. I had identified that Australia – in terms of video content creation, at least – was a very small place indeed and was wary of offending anyone. I humoured video collaboration requests I had no interest and was frankly disappointed by the results of. I gritted my teeth and accepted vexing Skype group chats that again I had no interest in. When eventually I had become so fed up of the experience that I did express these sentiments the other party was shocked. In hindsight I realise I was in part responsible for maintaining the illusion. When I dared to speak out about harrassment I received from one of the people in this ‘clique’ I was further shunned.

The concept of ‘community’ may contain some element of truth, but there is no one community rather a collection of communities, of social networks – or to abandon the jargon entirely, groups of friends. They form in organic ways and overlap with each other in ways that might seem counter-intuitive. I am frequently amazed at how often people know all the key players – but one – in a seeming social construct. Anyone who still maintains there is only one community is either confused or hopes to create one homogenus mass for reasons that beg considerable scrunity. One community with which to rule them, perhaps?

The true value of interaction – be it online, or otherwise – relates to the integrity of those conversations. While it might feel nice to have someone pay you lipservice, there is no real benefit to it. I don’t know about you, but frankly I lack the energy to maintain such facades. As I told the person who recently called me ‘pathetic’ I want my friendships to mean something.