Stumbled onto my YouTube homepage

Let me start by admitting that I am stupid. It took me long to realise that what shows up on my YouTube homepage as ‘suggested’, ‘recent’ or ‘popular’ is based on the videos I had already watched. That is on me. But I did, for a time, think that all the ‘A Closer Look’ videos were coming up on everyone’s computer and that that was a worldwide popular late night segment. I mean each video has about 1.3 million views, I was not completely delusional. And then I logged onto YouTube without signing in and I realised that I have no contact with what the rest of the world is watching. The difference was immense and I learnt so many things! Ariana Grande has more than one song, there is a YouTuber that looked for dead bodies in a forest and James Corden’s show is actually doing really well! Who would have thought? The fact that I am an idiot and did not realise that YouTube was tailored to my needs (even though I was fully aware of all the data protection scandals) is on me. The fact that I am practically living in a distinct social web from the person sitting next to me is kind of scary.

It is amazing that we have breadth and depth for our interests and preferences, but, at the same time, we only exchange views about these with similarly minded people. And then we think there is more of us, we think we are indisputable. That was perhaps the benefit of TV. There were some options, less options, that would play at a certain time. So say I was watching a crappy prime time show (cough-cough, Big Bang Theory, cough-cough). There would be other people in my immediate environment watching the same crappy prime time show, because it was on at ten pm. And some of them would agree with me and we would make fun of the show during our lunch break. Some others would disagree with me and argue for Jim Parsons, Aspergers-like performance. And these are the people that I am afraid are almost missing from the equation now. I don’t have to fight with all the ‘Team Coco’ subscribers; we all love Conan and none of us is ever going to subscribe to ‘Jay Leno’s Garage’. But I am shielded from the opposition. I am aware that this sounds like I wish we were all sending essays to each other about the stereotypes and sexism and joke repetition of ‘certain’ prime time shows. With an admittedly good theme song. But I mean casual conversation, where ideas are exchanged and not just reinforced or voted down. I swear I won’t talk about how the internet is robbing us from real human experience, like a grandma; this casual conversation can be on WhatsApp while on the toilet. The best kind.

Apparently this is a real problem that was particularly prominent in the 2016 election in the US, where if you compared a Democrat’s and Republican’s Facebook feed it was as if they were living in different countries. There are serious issues about personal data being available to all sorts of companies, but the reinforcement I choose to discuss is at a basic, pop-culture level, because that is all I know. We are all getting a biased version of reality that is shared, recycled and reinforced among us. It is just curious that the freedom offered by the internet may be making us all the more close-minded. And if that sounds like I made a life-shattering realisation, signed out of YouTube, stopped reading news on Twitter and visited a couple of contradicting sites, I did not. I really, really like my videos and not having to look for them. Yay progress!

I swore I was not going to make the grandma argument about real human experience within this post! But here I go. Newcomber, Festinger and many more social psychologists did a number of studies showing that stronger relationships and greater likeability developed with people that lived closer by and were encountered more often, compared to people with similar interests. I think this is how we function, it is in our DNA, it is related to oxytocin, and yes I am going to cite all the relevant psychology terms I know to project authority. But just as I thought everyone in my office watched ‘Screen Rant: Pitch Meetings’, I also think physical proximity is useful, nourishes critical thinking and even compassion.

And it is not like we can’t get both. If 1.3 million English-speaking people, likely to be aged from 20 to 40, with a similar sense of humour are watching ‘A Closer Look’ I will either find or convert someone. It is just equally good to have a third person sitting next to us while we watch it to point out that joking about Trump’s spelling mistakes on Twitter is a distraction from the more alarming aspects of his governance. It’s nice to have these sort of dull people around and love them just because they are physically next to you, rather than hate them behind a username. And people tend to have stupid usernames.