Is YouTube changing how young children act and see the world?
December 21, 2016 9:10 AM   Subscribe

 
People have been saying this since the days of Usenet.

What they fail to consider is that online is part of real life.

Also, the example in this article are pretty far out there as far as examples of "kids these days."
posted by cjorgensen at 9:15 AM on December 21, 2016 [32 favorites]


Tens of millions of ostensible adults can't tell the difference between controlled, edited television coverage and real life.
posted by Faint of Butt at 9:20 AM on December 21, 2016 [62 favorites]


Honestly, growing up with the idea that they're constantly being watched isn't the worst thing to do to children. It's probably better in the long run than older generations who put themselves online in social media without really appreciating the fact they have an audience.

My own children spend more time on YouTube than I'd prefer them to, but I don't see it having a negative effect on the way they interact with their peers or adults. Even the videos they watch that are glorified toy commercials don't seem to make them want the toys displayed. My kids may well be pretty unique in that regard, though, I'll give them that.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 9:28 AM on December 21, 2016


the distinction between the online world and real life is fading."

it's always kind of dumb to sensationalize these generational divides because ... reasons. But it's also not the wisest to just shrug them off as "... whatever, nothing we aint' seen before", because we haven't seen it before -- this level of immersion in media and its implications such as "Tens of millions of ostensible adults can't tell the difference between controlled, edited television coverage and real life" ...

Or more to the point: maybe if our education (certainly since the 1960s) had included WAY MORE grounding in the kind of stuff that Marshal McLuhan was endeavoring to elucidate, then maybe we wouldn't have "... Tens of millions of ostensible adults can't tell the difference between controlled, edited television coverage and real life."
posted by philip-random at 9:28 AM on December 21, 2016 [5 favorites]


The"weird" here seems to come more in the parenting than in any of the behavior of the children. So, congrats. Youtube has created a new generation of wannabe stage parents. Kids playing at being in entertainment careers isn't new at all; when the parents start taking those things super seriously and somehow coincidentally a bunch of children in the same family all desperately want to be performers, that's weird but definitely not in a new way.

The whole "we only let our children do this obsessively because it's what they wanted, this totally wasn't my idea" style of excusing it wouldn't be at all out of place on Toddlers and Tiaras or something. This is the distinction of the kid who wants to record Minecraft videos and the kid whose parent is clearly consciously promoting their kid, including by agreeing to do stories like this. The former seems totally normal, and the latter had been happening for decades before Youtube came along.
posted by Sequence at 9:32 AM on December 21, 2016 [7 favorites]


Seven-year-old Joel and 5-year-old Faith aren’t allowed to watch YouTube at home, unless their parents have seen the video first

I would rather wash my face with a cheese grater than have to pre-screen the kind of videos The Kids These Days like to watch

anyway the worst part of all this is when your kids stumble into the Here's Some Nineteen Year Old Dude With Political Opinions videos, which frequently emerge suddenly and without warning from the equally annoying but marginally less offensive Here's Some Nineteen Year Old Dude Yelling At Video Games videos, and then you have to spend an hour rhetorically smacking the alt-right out of them
posted by prize bull octorok at 9:33 AM on December 21, 2016 [33 favorites]


I started to read this thinking it was kind of interesting, but then it turns out that, as often happens, the media found some extreme outliers (in this case freak homeschooling baptist weirdos who probably just a few years ago dreamed of their own Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo style trainwreck reality show), and extrapolated these people to be the representatives of a generation. These people have professional lighting equipment and a "six-figure ad revenue stream", per definition they're not typical of anything.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 9:33 AM on December 21, 2016 [6 favorites]


As with just about any tool a tiny percentage of users will figure out how to make money using the tool, a slightly larger percentage will discover they can use the tool for their own creative ends and make things of varying levels of beauty, and a huge percentage of us will consume the output of the others.
posted by chavenet at 9:34 AM on December 21, 2016 [4 favorites]


So, wait, these kids are basically writing, performing, and filming movies on a semi-regular basis? And some of them are making money from it? Good for them!

Imagine a kid who's grown up being a director or camera operator the way some kids grow up playing baseball.

Yeah, there are all kinds of risks, but there are *always* risks. Healthy parental involvement is the way to go.
posted by rmd1023 at 9:35 AM on December 21, 2016 [3 favorites]


After generation Z comes generation AA and they will all be born during happy hour.
posted by sexyrobot at 9:39 AM on December 21, 2016 [12 favorites]


After generation Z comes generation AA

I just came in here for the Excel spreadsheet jokes
posted by beerperson at 9:48 AM on December 21, 2016 [46 favorites]


Imagine a kid who's grown up being a director or camera operator the way some kids grow up playing baseball.

This is exactly how Spielberg started -- his dad had a movie camera, so he futzed around with it, and hey presto.
posted by Etrigan at 9:48 AM on December 21, 2016


I'm an actual parent to a ten year old boy who's immersed in this culture, and yes, it's a serious future problem in the making and hard to fight back against even if you're trying.
posted by saulgoodman at 9:55 AM on December 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


Maybe it's because I have no children, but I'd never even heard of Ryan's Toys Review - and that's now the most-watched American YouTube channel!
posted by SisterHavana at 9:55 AM on December 21, 2016


BTW, more specifically, it seems to be making them consumer crazy and pathologically dissociative.
posted by saulgoodman at 9:57 AM on December 21, 2016 [4 favorites]


I find my son's interest in watching Overwatch gameplay videos completely mystifying but my kids are equally puzzled that I actually played D&D (and other games) 10 hours a week at their age. Plus ça change...
posted by GuyZero at 10:01 AM on December 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


The internet is a communication medium. It is not an alternate world. We need to stop dismissing it or treating it like it's not "real."

If the same communication and content was on VHS tapes and paper, or communicated over the phone it would not be treated as a different world.
posted by OwlBoy at 10:06 AM on December 21, 2016 [8 favorites]


On the one hand, part of the disconnect is that they're seeing what they're doing as performance, when in large part, that's just how they interact. I have a couple of young nephews who are online almost constantly. They make YouTube videos and stuff, but they're mostly just clowning with their friends the way kids always have, not trying to be famous or attract a general audience.

On the other hand, they really don't leave their house much. They don't even see their real life friends in person very often, and they don't, like, go outside. I had the older one come stay for a couple of months this year, and it was all about indulging Dotty Old Aunt Ernie's old-timey lifestyle of going to different physical locations. It was very strange for him, obviously. Most of his social interactions are kind of sheltered, really. Sure, he's being goofy and telling dirty jokes with his friends, as he should be, but he just isn't used to walking around and navigating society at large.

I've never been a fan of strong group identification, like I think it's very very weird and unproductive, not to mention just inaccurate, to perceive people primarily as members of some demographic. But it is a social trend, and social trends are always worth taking a critical eye to. I'm sure my nephews are representative or even typical, but there really do seem to be some negative effects on them. They are socializing with their friends, but they're not doing it while navigating the real world. They're not interacting with anyone outside their cohort much, and they seem almost afraid to try.
posted by ernielundquist at 10:08 AM on December 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


Like any big cultural change, there'll be some kids that thrive on this stuff and other kids that do really badly with it, and lots in the middle.

My kid's 6 and has almost zero exposure to any of this. At this point in my parenting, I don't even understand why or how it's hard to keep them away from it if you want to. I expect to have my eyes opened superwide in that regard over the next few years.

I do want to keep her mostly away from it, for now, because I don't think I'm a skilled enough judge of the course of my kid's development to know whether engaging deeply in this particular social experiment would be 'good' for her or not. Let other kids be the guinea pigs.

She'll probably miss out on something that she'd like, and that might even be good for her, but she'll do other things that she likes and are good for her. *shrug* Parenting's a bunch of tradeoffs.
posted by gurple at 10:11 AM on December 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


The part that's alarming to me is when a child and their "life" as filtered for YouTube is responsible for a significant chunk of family income. There are laws for child actors and their incomes because it's SUCH a ripe area for abuse. There aren't for YouTube child stars, and they're not playing a role but curating their own life for an audience to make money, so it's tough to retreat from or take a break from.

The amounts some of those kids are making is flatly horrifying in terms of the temptation to exploit them. You see it with a lot of family bloggers who get big, rely on the money, can't quit, and make increasingly questionable decisions about their children's privacy to keep the money coming.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 10:14 AM on December 21, 2016 [13 favorites]


BTW, more specifically, it seems to be making them consumer crazy and pathologically dissociative.

Huh. YMMV, I guess.

I also have a ten year old boy who is -- well, I don't know if "immersed" is the right word but he's certainly a product of generation YouTube. Like Max in the article I notice him frequently doing commentary on his life for his imagined audience, although nobody in our house has a channel aside from a few random family videos I have posted (they're unsearchable).

He and his friends all want to have YouTube channels, but -- I think because it is all so transparent -- they're all keenly aware that YouTube is pretty much a think you do on the side, vs. having it be your whole life.

My son isn't into unboxing (he mostly watches gaming videos), but there is one notable story about him and the YouTubes. My son is on the spectrum, but just barely. However, one thing he never really did was give voices to toys. His toys would do things, but he never felt they were real, never gave them lives or voices of their own. Pretending was just not a thing that his brain did, and nobody seemed to be able to teach it to him. Then he started watching a channel that was basically a person (I think a teenager) making up and filming stories using plush PvZ Zombies and Plants. And, lo and behold, about six months after that channel entered our lives, my son's toys began to have voices and he really and truly played pretend, in a way that he had never done when he was younger. Basically, a YouTuber taught my son to use his imagination in ways that no real playmate or therapist ever had.

When I was my son's age it was the end of the 1970s and I regularly pretended that I was being interviewed on one of the daytime talk shows my grandmother watched in the afternoons. I desperately wanted a camera, but of course at that time a movie camera was a serious investment, out of reach for a family. Now my son can film things with our old iPhone and is learning to edit.

And far from being "consumer crazy" I find that YouTube has helped my son more readily identify what is advertising and what is not, and why advertising exists -- both because of the ads he impatiently clicks through after five seconds to get to the video, but also because he can tell clearly when a Youtuber is featuring a game or product on their site to show it off vs. because they really love it.

Anyway, we monitor his YouTube, and talk about it with him, but I'm not concerned about it. Good channels are very much like having invisible friends on the internet.
posted by anastasiav at 10:16 AM on December 21, 2016 [20 favorites]


Man, that's a depressing article. It's the kind of article where you wish that instead of "let's pick the most alarming examples we can think of", they could do a real survey. I know some little kids, as it happens, and they're all allowed a tremendous amount more media freedom than I was, they all watch a lot of internet videos, their affect seems a lot more performance-oriented to me than the previous generations of little kids I've known, but "OMG they perform all the time" is a substantial overstatement. It would be interesting to know about how average children experience all this.

I admit, I tend to think that the pervasiveness of the opportunity to commodify the self is really creepy to me. It's very clear that being a likable amateur performer of one's own life is going to be a much more common career path in the next ten years or so and I find myself wondering what that does to one's interiority. If you're filming yourself living a lot of your average life, and you're constantly semi-consciously aware that your income depends on being likable in just the right way- diagnosing and embodying a particular collective fantasy - well, that seems like it would make it much harder to separate yourself from what you think others want. It seems like a bigger Big Other. And then there's the whole fact that being "a likable performer of one's own life" does mean embodying a particular collective fantasy - you can't look, act, speak or think in ways that are too far from what is prized by society. (Certainly enough deviation to be interesting, but only that much.)

It seems to me like a much more intimate and intrusive way of getting a living than pretty much anything I can imagine. I always think of The Guy Who Worked For Money as about as depressing a take on this as I can imagine. And of course the propaganda and corporate/government potential for such kind of thing is incalculable.

On the one hand, sure it's interesting, and (should global warming, pandemics or Trump not kill us all) humans will survive. And I'm an Old anyway, and the kind of Old who has a particular horror of not having some mental privacy, so I'm sure I'm primed to dislike this whole business more than most. But I do think that privacy is important - not just "privacy" in the sense that the government can't tell what you wrote online, but headspace privacy - places and times where you can do things with only the usual set of human anxieties instead of "how would this play on YouTube" in your head.
posted by Frowner at 10:19 AM on December 21, 2016 [10 favorites]


When I was my son's age it was the end of the 1970s and I regularly pretended that I was being interviewed on one of the daytime talk shows my grandmother watched in the afternoons. I desperately wanted a camera, but of course at that time a movie camera was a serious investment, out of reach for a family. Now my son can film things with our old iPhone and is learning to edit.

When I was a kid, back in the Stone Age when there were only three networks plus PBS, I would make mud pies in the back yard while doing a running narration as if I were Julia Child. "And now, just a sprinkling of marigold petals over the top! Isn't that lovely?" as I displayed the pie to the imaginary camera. Sometimes I'd pretend I was an intrepid explorer evading hazards to see wildlife and find marvels — that got an internal narrative that sounded like David Attenborough.

Kids have always done this kind of thing, AFAICT.
posted by Lexica at 10:20 AM on December 21, 2016 [15 favorites]


Sequence: The"weird" here seems to come more in the parenting than in any of the behavior of the children. So, congrats. Youtube has created a new generation of wannabe stage parents.

Except those "stage kids" of past generations at least got to interact with other "stage kids" in real life.

rmd1023: Imagine a kid who's grown up being a director or camera operator the way some kids grow up playing baseball.

This is quite apt, with the same sort of school efforts pushed aside (and eventually dreams dashed) for kids who see an easy path forward through sports, music, movies, whatever.

I agree with these two points on the article, with the caveat: these kids are also looking for peer support in a more superficial way - likes and passing comments. Their "imaginary friends" are only imaginary until they get sufficient followers. ernielundquist captured my fears for my boys, that "screen time" replaces "real world time." (Then again, my wife and I spend what I could consider to be an excessive amount of screen time, so they're learning it from us.)


Eyebrows McGee: The amounts some of those kids are making is flatly horrifying in terms of the temptation to exploit them. You see it with a lot of family bloggers who get big, rely on the money, can't quit, and make increasingly questionable decisions about their children's privacy to keep the money coming.

My only experience with young YouTube stars extends to Play Doh Eggs and kids playing with dinosaurs. It looks like most of the egg "stars" are adults without kids (visible/ present), and otherwise the kids are hidden and unnamed except by nickname. But with one of the channels, the mom names the brand of all the toys, which is super awkward to watch as an adult - it's clearly product placement, which results in them getting free toys to promote (also clearly stated in some videos, but still ... odd).

On the flip side, we don't watch much live TV beyond PBS, so it's pretty tame advertising, all possible sources considered.
posted by filthy light thief at 10:21 AM on December 21, 2016


On the other hand, they really don't leave their house much. They don't even see their real life friends in person very often, and they don't, like, go outside.

So it's a far bigger topic than I can ever do justice to but this was a trend in US society totally separate from the Internet that's been going on for 2+ decades. Suburban life and US car culture makes it hard for kids to get around to friends' houses. Families where both parents work has led to kids having high structured activities and much less free time to hang out. Kids have a lot more structured activities outside of school like sports and organized clubs.

In some ways the move to online socializing is really just a facet of that huge change in American culture as opposed to it being the driving force. It's kids who are at home alone looking for something to do as instead of kids being online so much that they don't socialize in-person.
posted by GuyZero at 10:21 AM on December 21, 2016 [27 favorites]


I guess it makes me angry because it seems to have accelerated the usual cycle of kids' boredom/being bored/won't someone entertain me?

witchen, I'm not being flip here -- why not let him make videos? Give him some kind of camera and computer access and some easy editing software and let him have at. What my kid has learned from doing this is that it is really hard to make a good video - editing takes time and effort - and it has taught him a stick-to-it-ive-ness and work ethic that I haven't seen him apply to other projects.
posted by anastasiav at 10:28 AM on December 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


Honestly, growing up with the idea that they're constantly being watched isn't the worst thing to do to children.

...said monotheists a few thousand years ago.
posted by Celsius1414 at 10:39 AM on December 21, 2016 [4 favorites]


What they fail to consider is that online is part of real life.

That's not the problem. The problem is if online becomes the only life.
posted by Celsius1414 at 10:40 AM on December 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


Except those "stage kids" of past generations at least got to interact with other "stage kids" in real life.

These kids do in fact seem to be interacting with other kids in real life. I don't approve of much that's going on here, but if they're not dealing with a wider variety of kids, I suspect that has a lot more to do with being homeschooled for religious reasons than for anything to do with making videos. A huge part of the Youtube scene these days is cross-promotion and collaboration.
posted by Sequence at 10:42 AM on December 21, 2016


as a parent, I frequently worry that my child isn't cross-promoting enough
posted by prize bull octorok at 10:44 AM on December 21, 2016 [17 favorites]


I don't have kids, so I can't really take an informed position on this, but it does strike me that people are never horrified by the world they've made until they see their kids successfully adapting to it.
posted by klanawa at 10:50 AM on December 21, 2016 [34 favorites]


I think of a generation coming up where language expression is secondary to being charismatic and entertaining

Given the election results, I don't think it's the generation coming up that has that problem...
posted by Slinga at 10:50 AM on December 21, 2016 [5 favorites]


On the other hand, they really don't leave their house much.

A question: how comfortable would these parents be to kick their kids into their own back yard and tell them not to come back in for a few hours? Or even to let them free in the neighbourhood to roam and find other kinds and so get into "stuff"?

I kind of think these sorts of video interactions are adaptations which allow kids an outlet for unstructured, often imaginative play, and to do so with kids not part of their local circle. They might find this otherwise difficult to negotiate with their parents in meatspace, i.e. through scheduled play with people the parent knows only.
posted by bonehead at 10:52 AM on December 21, 2016 [3 favorites]


Back in the late 1970s/early 1980s, my BFF and I had this running narrative about the people in our grade school. It was called School Stuff and we did little skits about day-to-day things that happened in school, made up stories about what the teachers and the principal did when they weren't in school, sang songs about school, etc. We recorded hours of this on bunches of cassettes and I think I still have some at my parents' house.

Nowadays, that would be YouTube gold. Back then, I'd have died if anyone else heard it. (Heck, I would probably cringe at it these days!)
posted by SisterHavana at 10:52 AM on December 21, 2016


Sisterhavana: It would probably still be YouTube gold. Go pick up those tapes. Make videos with either stock image still shots as background and just the audio narration, or go all out and animate it with lego or hand-drawn pictures or whatever. I'd be fascinated to watch that. Hell, send me a memail when it's done and I'll watch it with my ad-blocker turned off, just to make it worth your while.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 11:00 AM on December 21, 2016 [3 favorites]


Max’s family is used to hearing him pretend that strangers on the Internet can see him.

Because kids sure never pretended to be on TV or anything before that. *le eyeroll*
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:02 AM on December 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


The disapproval of adults will certainly make this an unappealing activity for youth, that's the way it's always worked in the past.
posted by Sebmojo at 11:08 AM on December 21, 2016 [10 favorites]


So it's a far bigger topic than I can ever do justice to but this was a trend in US society totally separate from the Internet that's been going on for 2+ decades. Suburban life and US car culture makes it hard for kids to get around to friends' houses. Families where both parents work has led to kids having high structured activities and much less free time to hang out. Kids have a lot more structured activities outside of school like sports and organized clubs.

All of these things are true, and I'm well aware of them, but none of that applies to my nephews, or indeed, anyone in my family.

These are urban kids, with parents often working unusual hours, being watched by extended family and friends when necessary. I don't think either of them have ever even been in day care, they and their friends are not wealthy enough to be overscheduled, and maybe half of them have access to a reliable car. As I said, I'm sure they're not representative, but neither are those overscheduled suburban kids.

Just a few years ago, they were out wandering around, playing in vacant lots and clowning around on street corners, but gradually, they--and according to their parents, many of their friends--left the house less and less, as they got better and more reliable access to entertainment and communication channels in their homes.

It's not a black and white issue at all. There are definite benefits to kids interacting on the internet, but there are also tradeoffs.
posted by ernielundquist at 11:16 AM on December 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


I remember how much I wanted to make films when I was in elementary school. Eventually I begged or borrowed enough money to buy a used standard VHS video camera at a garage sale. . . and I discovered that (1) in-camera editing is really tedious, (2) making video with no actual audience is pretty unfulfilling, and (3) I wasn't actually very good at film making. (I switched to audio, a medium in which I also have no talent, but at least one that could be fully explored using consumer hardware in the 90s.)

The idea of every elementary school kid today is walking around with multiple HD video cameras and a free suite of non-linear editing software in their pockets is truly mind blowing. We live in the future, and it's made it possible for kids today to realize all the stupid garbage ideas that we all would have pursued when we were young if only we'd had the opportunity. It'll take a lot more than a few wacky anecdotes to convince me we should be frightened, rather than awed and slightly jealous, that this opportunity exists.

Have you seen the sort of things they play on America's Funniest Home Videos? During PRIME TIME? Our world is doomed. DOOMED, I tell ya'.
posted by eotvos at 11:17 AM on December 21, 2016 [5 favorites]


This is a terribly naive question, but ... how do your children get into the whole YouTube culture to begin with? Is this just something they pick up through osmosis when going over to other children's houses, the same way children from non-cable-subscribing households got to watch MTV at their friends' back in the 1980s?
posted by sobell at 11:30 AM on December 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


Yay our new dystopian hellscape has new facets for me to be terrified of!

*knits herself a blanket cocoon*
posted by corb at 11:31 AM on December 21, 2016


Just a few years ago, they were out wandering around, playing in vacant lots and clowning around on street corners, but gradually, they--and according to their parents, many of their friends--left the house less and less, as they got better and more reliable access to entertainment and communication channels in their homes.

They also got older in that time. It's tough making broad statements about changes in society if you're only looking at one set of kids who are themselves always changing. And maybe it's just them. I know kids who have very little to do with the online world, in so far as that's even possible today. But certainly living online is possible in a way today that was never possible before and some kids are really into it.
posted by GuyZero at 11:40 AM on December 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


how do your children get into the whole YouTube culture to begin with?

Every kids watches YouTube the same way nearly every kid has seen a football or baseball game on TV at some point. Some kids go on to be really, really into sports and most kids don't. Some kids get really into YouTube for whatever reason.
posted by GuyZero at 11:41 AM on December 21, 2016


This is a terribly naive question, but ... how do your children get into the whole YouTube culture to begin with? Is this just something they pick up through osmosis when going over to other children's houses, the same way children from non-cable-subscribing households got to watch MTV at their friends' back in the 1980s?

My son first saw videos on YouTube when I would show him Sesame Street videos on the tablet when he was about two. (SS has an amazing YouTube channel, BTW.) It probably helps that we don't really watch broadcast TV (baseball is my exception to this), so anything we're watching at home is streaming (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon) or or YT. (I watched the entire run of Great British Baking on YT, for example, streaming it over my XBox.) So, it is as natural for my son to watch "tv" via YT as it was for us to turn on the TV and watch broadcast.

He started being interested in gaming videos when he was 6, because other kids at school watched Stampy. From there, he started searching for some cartoons on his own (notably he watches a lot of Pokemon cartoons in Japanese with subtitles) and started watching other gaming channels that he either heard about at school or that YT suggested he might like.

Some things he watches once and decides he doesn't like. Some things he'll watch the entire run of and then stop watching that channel. Sometimes I'll overhear things and veto a channel (and now he's pretty good about understanding what content I'll veto and he does turn things off pretty quickly without me telling him to).

He watches YT on our TV, in the living room, streaming first through Roku and now through the XBox. In some ways him coming in after homework is indistinguishable from me watching TV after school in the '70s - the real difference isn't the medium, it is who is making the message. Frankly, I'm happier to have him watch content made by some kid near his own age in their bedroom vs. a slick package produced by Disney. But maybe that's just me.
posted by anastasiav at 11:55 AM on December 21, 2016 [4 favorites]


You know, GuyZero, if it's that important to you 'splain this to me, go ahead, but I'm just going to point out that I very explicitly and repeatedly said that I was not making any broad generalizations, but that I have witnessed some aspects of this exact trend that are pretty different from what the article concludes. The kids I know (who are, of course, completely representative of all children, right?) are using YouTube primarily to communicate with their friends the way kids always have. But for some of those kids, including some I know pretty well, it has started to become their primary channel for interactions, which can cause some real problems with their ability to navigate the real world.

Everyone has seen these lifestyle pieces about "kids these days," almost always focusing on fairly sheltered middle class kids. They're always as ridiculous as lifestyle pieces are, and they're always tainted with the perspectives of the type of people who write lifestyle articles, including the perception that kids making videos of themselves are obviously doing it in order to gain some kind of celebrity, and that is a huge question they're begging.
posted by ernielundquist at 12:11 PM on December 21, 2016


Annie doesn’t aspire to meet celebrities but the girls who get millions of views for braiding hair.

What exactly is the difference between a celebrity and a person that millions of people watch in videos? I dunno, this sentence just feels perfectly emblematic of the mostly artificial differences this article pretends to identify between 'kids these days' and 'when I was a kid'. There's some interesting actual points but there's just so much nonsense that it's not worth digging through.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 12:18 PM on December 21, 2016 [4 favorites]


You know, GuyZero, if it's that important to you 'splain this to me, go ahead

Sorry for fixating on the wrong part of your comment. I get what you're saying.
posted by GuyZero at 12:25 PM on December 21, 2016


how do your children get into the whole YouTube culture to begin with?

From a data point of 1, I'd say because there's a YouTube icon on the tablet and he's going to investigate every icon to see what it does. Some are more appealing than others.

YouTube probably works particularly well because of how it instantly offers up suggestions (and even automatically skips onwards to the next video) based on your viewing history, so once the kid finds something they like it's an endless stream of entertainment.
posted by UbuRoivas at 12:43 PM on December 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


how do your children get into the whole YouTube culture to begin with?

Other kids, in my experience. Mine didn't know it existed till they visited some friends who said "hey, look at this!" Since then my house has been cursed daily with the sound of "DanTDM" yelling about minecraft.

My wife and I have come to really hate the sound of that limey bastards' voice.
posted by fimbulvetr at 12:53 PM on December 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


While I am open to the possibility that too much Youtube obsession could become bad, I don't really see how kids pretending that they are acting out their daily lives for their Youtube fans is much different from 9 year old me hitting rocks and dreaming I was in the World Series.
posted by thelonius at 1:15 PM on December 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


What exactly is the difference between a celebrity and a person that millions of people watch in videos?

I think a celebrity has their life and doings followed beyond the thing they are famous for doing. So actors who just act, even if lots of people see them act: not celebrities. Actors who's fans also get to learn about about what their houses look like or when they vaccinate their kids, who they're dating/marrying/divorcing etc., etc. etc: celebrities. Athletes who just show up and golf/swim/kick/whatever: not celebrity. Athlete with endorsements, tabloid coverage, memoir and recipe book, etc.: celebrity.

I'm not saying I think it's better/more normal/anything else for kids to follow non-celebrity kids on youtube than celebrity kids or adults via other mediums, I'm just saying that's the difference I think between a celebrity and someone who is viewed braiding hair on youtube millions of times.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 1:48 PM on December 21, 2016


Frowner:
... It's very clear that being a likable amateur performer of one's own life is going to be a much more common career path in the next ten years or so and I find myself wondering what that does to one's interiority. If you're filming yourself living a lot of your average life, and you're constantly semi-consciously aware that your income depends on being likable in just the right way- diagnosing and embodying a particular collective fantasy - well, that seems like it would make it much harder to separate yourself from what you think others want...
I agree. But the deterioration of interiority might extend beyond earning income to alter the very definition of what it means to be liked. If kids grow up defining themselves and their friends by what they see on YouTube (and other social media services like Instagram), it might put more and more pressure on them to be likeable and "normal" by doing the things they see others doing online. A generation of performers, rather than experiencers - with actual, quantifiable metrics that tell them just how much they're liked, instead of subjective impressions.
posted by Kevin Street at 6:00 PM on December 21, 2016


"... I'm just saying that's the difference I think between a celebrity and someone who is viewed braiding hair on youtube millions of times."

Maybe there just isn't a secondary ecosystem developed yet to take advantage of "Internet Fame" the way tabloids and gossip websites make money from regular celebrities with high Q scores.
posted by Kevin Street at 6:21 PM on December 21, 2016


Imagine a kid who's grown up being a director or camera operator the way some kids grow up playing baseball.

Good news! One of the greatest cartoons of all time is based on this very premise. Although I'm glad it was made pre-YouTube.
posted by Existential Dread at 6:53 PM on December 21, 2016 [3 favorites]


I don't really see how kids pretending that they are acting out their daily lives for their Youtube fans is much different from 9 year old me hitting rocks and dreaming I was in the World Series.

I think the difference is a strong reward signal -- # of views -- pushing children in the direction of what a horde of random other children on the internet think is entertaining.
posted by gold-in-green at 10:03 PM on December 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


A question: how comfortable would these parents be to kick their kids into their own back yard and tell them not to come back in for a few hours? Or even to let them free in the neighbourhood to roam and find other kinds and so get into "stuff"?

Well, given that the neighbors would call the police, the parents would be visited by Child Protective Services, and the kids would be put into foster care, probably not very. These days, unsupervised roaming and free time is considered a sign of neglect and bad parenting just shy of physical abuse.
posted by happyroach at 11:26 AM on December 22, 2016 [2 favorites]


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