Over the past year (plus, plus…), while scrolling through social media, I’ve noticed, among the pages and people that I’ve intentionally liked or followed, my feed is peppered with videos made by random, regular human beings. In other words, not celebrities. Some of these videos are dynamic, entertaining, and intriguing; some are horribly poor – both in video quality and in content. Sometime early in the summer, I began actively searching YouTube for these content creators. I realized that I had watched many of these sorts of videos in the past, without entirely knowing or thinking about it, in order to gain knowledge of some sort (generally reviews / comparisons of various products or philosophical concept explanations and the like). Some of these videos were produced by large, reliable companies, such as REI or Patagonia but not all of them. Regardless, someone out there had made a helpful video about something I wanted to know.
What was different in this case was, one, social media was feeding me obsure entertainment that they thought might be of interest, and, B, they were more or less entertaining without any real substance.
The two types of videos that stood out to me were the commoner making a seemingly easy, weeknight meal and the couple documenting how they travel. As a trained culinarian, I became a little mesmerized by the twenty-something-year-old cleavage and fake nails quietly pointing at and dumping a bag of Great Value (Walmart) brand frozen burritos into a Pyrex dish and covering them several other Great Value products. Initially, my thoughts were these: Why was I seeing this video? and Was it an advertisement for Walmart? Until I realized that it was just a young mom making a crappy video. Then there were these nicely shot and edited videos of people talking about hotel rooms, plane rides, and airport lounges; not necessarily documenting their travel destinations, but rather the elements or simple comforts of travel. How odd. My dive into YouTube then produced videos from the auto-documentation of a competitive eater to people telling you to and how to document whatever you want!
Suddenly, I felt a bit annoyed. I’ve done so much in my life, but in my twenties and thirties, we didn’t have the technology to film and post in this new-fangled way. But I have so much to say!
The common thread I detected throughout these videos was the age of the creator. I’ve been enjoying the entertainment and semi-learning aspect of these videos, but sadly, being an older human being, I don’t entirely relate to someone 20 years my junior. This observation led me to specifically look up content creators over 50, in which case, they are there – albeit few and far between.
I will stop here for just a moment to say that I’ve lived the past twelve years with my wonderful and dear parents, who would often say things like, in my day you could go to a movie for 10 cents – and that’s including popcorn and a coke…or Facebook is broken again! Which, of course, it was not. Or why do I have to buy a subscription to Microsoft 365 on this new computer? I already have a Microsoft Office CD. And I realized that I don’t want to be that old person. I mean, it’s inevitable that we age and that we all think our particular generation knows best and therefore, should be preserved. But rather than remaining stuck in the glory days, I want to keep learning and evolving – keep up with the time, as it were, as much as possible – find a way to meld the brilliance of my generation with progress.
OK, with that briefly said, I started thinking about two things: one, that I could perhaps film a sort of retrospection of my travels and experiences from the past – I’ve forever been told that I should write a book. Why not do the storytelling in this new format? And two was my dissertation. Oh, yeah, I’m currently a PhD candidate, writing a dissertation about nineteenth-century literature and past storytelling. But wait, people are telling stories in a different form today. How might today’s current action be a reinvigoration of the past? That is, is today’s video storytelling format a quasi-return to the oral tradition? Could I experiment with filming discussions of the literature with which I’m working? These concepts really fascinate me. But I don’t know if anyone else but me would care. I still love the written word, but of course, we are never bound to just one thing. Is there something to be learned from exploring this trending genre? Well, that was a poor question, of course there is… the question is: how many facets are there to be learned through such an exploration?
In addition, I’m curious how many other people my age would like to see people their own age. I’d like to speak to people who get my jokes and perhaps even a few younger people that might glean a bit of knowledge from my experience.