Dearest readers, we live in an age where the same website gives you cute cat videos and serious life and financial advice. Suffice to say, YouTube has become a Internet that runs on the actual Internet like a token on a blockchain, so to speak. We have been professional watchers and listeners in our free time. Now, what we got here is the failure to communicate ;) How is communication breaking down? I feel it is breaking down not just because large tech companies are run by people who need to take classes on being human, but also because platforms such as YouTube have made us learn something really amazing and forget something really important all at the same time- especially the youngest of us social media participants. When I talk about it, you will know exactly what I am referring too and maybe you will find it important to help people recover from what YouTube and its companions masking as competitors are making us lose.
Have you heard of the YouTube rabbit hole effect? It is generated by how its algorithms work right now. The more stuff you watch, the more similar content YouTube tries to serve up to you. Now, if you are younger and you are trying to find topics that interest you so you can devote your free time and passion to them, this is great. YouTube will keep serving up content that helps you create a cohesive framework that will strengthen your knowledge and skills, but also your ideas and beliefs. For those who are older, YouTube is an excellent time saver because it is a giant reference book on how to get things done around the house, get great tips on maintaining your health, becoming more efficient and self reliant, going down memory lane a la Pepperidge Farm (haha) and so on... In one of my personal examples, looking up how to make a specific recipe (Thai red curry) got me looking at multiple videos by cooks from different backgrounds and with different takes on the recipe, and then I got into Thai food, then I got in my suggestions some Korean cooking channels with English subtitles that got me into homemade Kimbap and sushi sandwiches, then I somehow got exposed to great meal prep ideas (I love make ahead portioned out meal prep style dishes) and on and on it went. Being exposed to audiovisual content on my own time, I got to learn and then make not just the dishes I wanted, but also the dishes I did not even know existed. I cannot, now or ever, blame YouTube for the rabbit hole effect because it had nothing but a positive, transformative effect on the food I cook for myself, friends and family (especially on the weekends). Once you cook on a regular basis, you plan your grocery trips better too, they become cheaper and faster, and then you also commit more and more recipes to memory because you logically learn what goes well together and so much more :) Oh, and outside of cooking, I learned how to swap out RAM and hard drives (clone them as well) in a desktop PC, I learned the many wonders of WD-40 and I leveled up my supplements game ten times over; these are just a few of the many things for which I can thank YouTube rabbit holes.
However, now comes the very, very bad part- the thing that YouTube is accidentally erasing from our heads. These YouTube rabbit holes, they are great for skills and general knowledge that is closer to exact science, though science in itself is never as exact as we would love it to be. Where it fails miserably is in its rabbit holes that relate to culture, history, religion, philosophy and other such things that seriously affect how a person views societies, cultures, how we got here (history) and where we are going. My dearest readers, people fall in love with ideas, sometimes so much that they refuse to see anything else. Some ideas are better than others, some ideas can be more dangerous than others. In my mind, the most dangerous ideas are not the ones that cause you to do most harm in real life, but the ones that close your eyes and ears to everything else that challenges those ideas. To sum up, by creating rabbit holes, YouTube has made some dangerous ones that are making people so in love with their narratives that they will refuse to look for middle ground between their narratives and narratives of other people unless they are in total agreement. We are getting information bubbles that attack each other as they treat each other like viruses that are to be exterminated. When this is how you begin to feel about those you have less in common with, you are readier to see them as a threat versus someone equally deserving of life, though they go about it in a different way. As such, even the smallest clash between their world and yours triggers you to make mountains out of mole hills.
How bad is this issue? I remember reading years ago about some key differences between humans and chimps. What stuck with me the most is that humans can coordinate successfully large groups of individuals, whereas chimps cannot. For example, a gigantic football stadium full of humans is generally a good time (for the winning team haha); a stadium full of chimps is mayhem at its finest. If YouTube and other such platforms destroy our ability to bridge ideological divides created by their rabbit holes, we will be closer to chimps much more than we have been in the last 200,000 years! Nothing against chimps- I just prefer humans :)
Have you heard of the YouTube rabbit hole effect? It is generated by how its algorithms work right now. The more stuff you watch, the more similar content YouTube tries to serve up to you. Now, if you are younger and you are trying to find topics that interest you so you can devote your free time and passion to them, this is great. YouTube will keep serving up content that helps you create a cohesive framework that will strengthen your knowledge and skills, but also your ideas and beliefs. For those who are older, YouTube is an excellent time saver because it is a giant reference book on how to get things done around the house, get great tips on maintaining your health, becoming more efficient and self reliant, going down memory lane a la Pepperidge Farm (haha) and so on... In one of my personal examples, looking up how to make a specific recipe (Thai red curry) got me looking at multiple videos by cooks from different backgrounds and with different takes on the recipe, and then I got into Thai food, then I got in my suggestions some Korean cooking channels with English subtitles that got me into homemade Kimbap and sushi sandwiches, then I somehow got exposed to great meal prep ideas (I love make ahead portioned out meal prep style dishes) and on and on it went. Being exposed to audiovisual content on my own time, I got to learn and then make not just the dishes I wanted, but also the dishes I did not even know existed. I cannot, now or ever, blame YouTube for the rabbit hole effect because it had nothing but a positive, transformative effect on the food I cook for myself, friends and family (especially on the weekends). Once you cook on a regular basis, you plan your grocery trips better too, they become cheaper and faster, and then you also commit more and more recipes to memory because you logically learn what goes well together and so much more :) Oh, and outside of cooking, I learned how to swap out RAM and hard drives (clone them as well) in a desktop PC, I learned the many wonders of WD-40 and I leveled up my supplements game ten times over; these are just a few of the many things for which I can thank YouTube rabbit holes.
However, now comes the very, very bad part- the thing that YouTube is accidentally erasing from our heads. These YouTube rabbit holes, they are great for skills and general knowledge that is closer to exact science, though science in itself is never as exact as we would love it to be. Where it fails miserably is in its rabbit holes that relate to culture, history, religion, philosophy and other such things that seriously affect how a person views societies, cultures, how we got here (history) and where we are going. My dearest readers, people fall in love with ideas, sometimes so much that they refuse to see anything else. Some ideas are better than others, some ideas can be more dangerous than others. In my mind, the most dangerous ideas are not the ones that cause you to do most harm in real life, but the ones that close your eyes and ears to everything else that challenges those ideas. To sum up, by creating rabbit holes, YouTube has made some dangerous ones that are making people so in love with their narratives that they will refuse to look for middle ground between their narratives and narratives of other people unless they are in total agreement. We are getting information bubbles that attack each other as they treat each other like viruses that are to be exterminated. When this is how you begin to feel about those you have less in common with, you are readier to see them as a threat versus someone equally deserving of life, though they go about it in a different way. As such, even the smallest clash between their world and yours triggers you to make mountains out of mole hills.
How bad is this issue? I remember reading years ago about some key differences between humans and chimps. What stuck with me the most is that humans can coordinate successfully large groups of individuals, whereas chimps cannot. For example, a gigantic football stadium full of humans is generally a good time (for the winning team haha); a stadium full of chimps is mayhem at its finest. If YouTube and other such platforms destroy our ability to bridge ideological divides created by their rabbit holes, we will be closer to chimps much more than we have been in the last 200,000 years! Nothing against chimps- I just prefer humans :)