My Personal YouTube Crisis
So this past week definitely affected me a lot, but I wasn’t really sure why. I mean, I wasn’t personally involved in any of this. I wasn’t the one abused or manipulated or betrayed… 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 lives… 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 they’d stick by him no matter what, thinking that they knew him better and there was ‘no way he could ever do that’.
As if a collection of tweets and videos and blog posts and interviews could somehow add up to intimate knowledge of a living person.
That’s 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 ‘gods’ to be worshiped. Maybe both.
So, my first instinct was to want to run away. To say that this all must be ‘evil’ and it’s 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 that’s 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 ground… a balance.
So I’m going to try that. I’m just going to work on taking a step back and distancing myself from the idea that these people are inherently ‘better’ than us or their lives more interesting than ours. That’s all.
I’m still here and I’m 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, and collaboration, and this community, and talking to you all, and reading and writing stories together… and I even still like YouTubers (albeit, a few less now). That’s 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.
TL;DR: I pulled a crabstickz. I’m not quitting YouTube, I’m quitting “YouTube” :p
Anyway, thanks for listening to this mess of a rant <3
