Yesterday, Diana and I went to Epcot for lunch, as our favorite time of year, the Food & Wine Festival, has started. It was crazy busy, which I would expect later in the day, but not at lunch time. It was also hot, in a gross way, so we didn't stay very long. We started in the Odyssey building, where in recent years they've had wings and beers and ciders. I had the plant-based "chicken," which was meh but in a great sauce, and a cider flight. There weren't a lot of tables, but Diana found one, giving us a chance to sit and look through the passport for other things we wanted to try over the next few months.
I notice there's a guy leaning over a table next to me, and I hear him talking with his phone propped up on the table. I assumed that he was just video calling someone, but on second glance, I realized that the only thing on the phone was him, and with the red icon, it appeared that he was live streaming himself. Eating. I desperately wanted to know how many people were interested in watching a guy eat by himself at a theme park. I'm sure it's a non-zero number, which is enough to make me kind of sad.
The Internet is an amazing, potentially democratizing technology, because it evens the playfield in being able to make things and share them widely. It's true for everything from selling stuff to distributing a feature film. It does frustrate me that so much of this is now dominated by platforms, but as someone who was able to pay their mortgage for years in the pre-platform era, with an unreal amount of advertising revenue potential, I can say first hand that at least the same pipes connect any person with anything out there. That's powerful.
The guy live streaming lunch wasn't hurting anyone, I know that. The loads of ephemeral "content" (the word used for anything that isn't art, journalism or something else useful) is mostly harmless, unless you consider the growing inability of people to go a minute without doomscrolling harmful. What bothers me is the two-sided economy of people who think that they're interesting enough to broadcast and the people who want to spend a lot of time watching it. And while there are some number of people who benefit from this, mostly it gives free stuff to the platforms to surround by advertising. It seems like attention whoring, and that's icky.
When I bought my first semi-pro video camera, I was intent on telling stories, but not my stories. The world is filled with fascinating people and situations that have nothing to do with me. In the cases that I've turned the camera around on me, it seems pretty boring. But this "personality media," for lack of a better term, dominates not just the Internet, but much of linear cable TV. Again, it seems like attention whoring, which lacks humility, curiosity and empathy. Aren't we missing a lot of that already, in our society?
Fortunately there are a lot of bright spots. The makers, science educators and tech enthusiasts that I watch put out a lot of great video, and those are not "content creators." They're inventors, teachers and journalists. Many of them host what they do, but they tend to be interesting personalities, and they're mostly telling stories. I wish that more people would aspire to that level, exercising humility, curiosity and empathy. What we don't need is another dude screaming at his phone telling us he's our boy doing some shit that everyone will forget in minutes.
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