My Personal YouTube Crisis
So this past week definitely affected me a lot, but I wasnāt really sure why. I mean, I wasnāt personally involved in any of this. I wasnāt the one abused or manipulated or betrayedā¦ so why on earth did I feel like I had been?
I guess I realized just how invested in this YouTube thing I really am, how much my blog is devoted to these people, how much I care about every little thing that happens in their livesā¦ and also how much I was dehumanizing them.
I was starting to subconsciously see these people as characters rather than human beings: gifs to reblog, tweets to screenshot, fics to write, videos to watch. Then when I saw their actions having consequences on the real world, that little bubble burst.
This past week, we saw the danger that can result from this power dynamic that YouTubers can hold over us as fans. But even after more than a dozen people had spoken out against a particular YouTuber, there were still loads of people defending him, saying theyād stick by him no matter what, thinking that they knew him better and there was āno way he could ever do thatā.
As if a collection of tweets and videos and blog posts and interviews could somehow add up to intimate knowledge of a living person.
Thatās a really dangerous idea.
I became very concerned that I was perpetuating this dehumanization of YouTubers by the stories I wrote and the things I reblogged - that I was either stripping them down to one-dimensional characters, or that I was building them up into āgodsā to be worshiped. Maybe both.
So, my first instinct was to want to run away. To say that this all must be āevilā and itās best if I just leave: no more fics, no more gifs, no more pictures, no more videos. To have nothing to do with this community anymore.
But thatās not really the answer, is it? That kind of all-or-nothing attitude is rarely the answer for anything, actually. There must be a sort of middle groundā¦ a balance.
So Iām going to try that. Iām just going to work on taking a step back and distancing myself from the idea that these people are inherently ābetterā than us or their lives more interesting than ours. Thatās all.
Iām still here and Iām still Bethany. I still like sign language, and pictures of galaxies, and badly-worded text posts, and perfectly looping gifs, and phanart, and tag rants, and music, and calligraphy, andĀ collaboration, and this community, and talking to you all, andĀ reading and writing stories togetherā¦ and I even still like YouTubers (albeit, a few less now). Thatās not going to change. What will (hopefully) be changing is how I personally look at and think about the YouTubers I watch and blog about. Ā
TL;DR: I pulled a crabstickz. Iām not quitting YouTube, Iām quitting āYouTubeā :p
Anyway, thanks for listening to this mess of a rant <3
