Ryan ChartrandSince YouTube now has $1.65 billion and Google making it look that much more important, it’s about time someone rid the Earth of the world’s most disturbing fad; video blogging.
I can spend hours perusing the endless viral media on YouTube, but when it comes to watching video blogging, my entire body shuts off and I feel like I’m trapped in a mental hospital with clones of Joel Siegel blocking every exit.
For those of you who haven’t yet experienced the wonderful world of video blogging, you really shouldn’t. But for the purpose of an informative column, video blogging is a way for people to basically stop interacting with their own society and start conversing with pure idiots. It takes the now old-fashioned message board to a new level where “purplemonkeyboy” now has a face, a voice and a creepy, dark room to accompany his/her disturbing inner thoughts.
If you want to truly experience video blogging, however, you have to really dive into the deep end of YouTube’s world of terrifying insanity (the exaggeration is yet to set in). It’s the point when you start seeing 13-year-old girls talking about getting a tattoo and then seeing a 45-year-old math teacher, a 34-year-old man preaching about anorexia and a 16-year-old in desperate need of a girlfriend responding in video form. Imagine dead silence not only in your room, but in the background of their rooms as well. The feeling you get when watching is synonymous with the feeling known as “I just saw Grandma and Grandpa in the bath tub.”
There’s something about staring into the eyes of a pixellated human being who you know is unstable on multiple levels as the hum of their computers acts as their heartbeat. You, a random passerby, enter into their diary, into their deepest inner thoughts. Why would you ever want to even get near the diving board of the mind of a 56-year-old man named Zippy? What part of your brain is gaining satisfaction or knowledge of life by watching a girl getting her hair ready in the morning for three minutes?
This could be my second week in a row of sounding like an old geezer saying we need to start being human beings again, but I think I have a point when I say mental institutions have a new market they should be watching. At what point will the world society “jack out” of their computers and talk to their real friends instead of their possibly misleading virtual “homies”?
My last case is certainly arguable: A 79-year-old man telling stories of his life as if YouTube viewers are his grandchildren. How do his actual grandchildren who are watching at home feel about it? “Hey, look! Grandpa’s on YouTube! Why’s NaughtyGirl06 responding without any clothes on?” Take that my old geezer friends, even your generation is falling to the disease known as video blogging. Sure, his stories might be interesting, but can anyone explain why he spends more hours blogging than speaking to his actual grandchildren?
Unfortunately, YouTube, whose owners recently in a posted video said they’d be “fixing problems,” is yet to even fix the myriad of problems bombarding the site as it is. Unfortunately, this fad could be here to stay for quite some time.
So then, since we’re stuck with each other you deranged, egotistical video bloggers, I beg you to follow some rules: If you’re going to upload video to YouTube, make sure it’s for the good of humanity. Deion Sanders montages, broken legs, Vader sessions, “The Daily Show” clips and Gnarls Barkley videos are all logical, entertaining additions to YouTube. “UKGuy69” telling the world that his underwear wasn’t clean this morning, unnecessary. Keep humanity in mind; some of us are holding onto sanity dearly.