Beyond the Handbook

Adventuring into digital media is like taking a swim into deep waters, and there are two ways to approach: dive right in or dip your toe in first. I’d call myself a dipper. Maybe because I am a gen X’er with a life experience that spans rapid paced technology. For example, I started offer learning to place phone calls on a rotary phone, now I have a mini-computer in my pocket that I rarely use to actually make a phone call. Tech and I have always had a precarious dance, but once comfortable I become pretty apt with it. It’s the same with digital media.

Digital media in the sense of modern conveniences took me some time to work to expanding from traditional television and movies to modern streaming services. Now I cannot manage life without streaming. The slight annoyance with the new marid of streaming options is quickly replaced with the drunken power of instant access to whatever media I wish to watch (even if it takes a search of a dozen different services to find some obscure 1980s gem of a movie that just crossed my mind at 8pm on a Thursday evening…bingo, there it is).

For the target purpose of this blog, I will focus on YouTube, not only because of its advance streaming capabilities but also because of its ability to pull up content on whatever crosses my mind. I am not a content creator; I am purely a content consumer. In the beginning (circa 2012’ish) I consumed whatever my curiosity enticed me to search (this is before “The Algorithm” was a known entity to me) and this created some, we’ll say, interesting results. This brings me to my initial (and by initial, I mean some weeks after watching with abandoned) reaction to YouTube digital media: What the hell am I watching?

It took some weeding, some pruning, to get my home page under control, started following pages that truly interest me and finally I was able to see the forest though the trees. Phew, organization to the chaos. My enjoyment today is primarily engaging with pages I follow. My nightly house chores are usually accompanied by a video playing in the background.

What I notice most about digital media is ad placement and how I perceive advertising. My gen X brain was geared towards television ads. I grew up on network broadcasting, the Sunday night movie, Saturday morning cartoons and TV ads. I barely registered an ad break. It was an excuse to go to the bathroom or get a snack. Now an ad mid-streaming is like fingernails down a chalkboard. As if waiting the 30 seconds for the skip ad button is life altering. The instant gratification of it all has replaced the pause provided by the mid-program ad break. Maybe I could do with some ad breaks just to take a breath and absorb. Zone out for three minutes.

As we live a life of instant needs met and entertainment from the search bar, ads have become more insistent. Ads pop up everywhere, and pack in what you need to know in 30 seconds or less. Most ads hope you stick around past those seemingly time dilated 30 and if you do watch a little longer, or if you have clogged up your algorithm, ads become unfocused. The ads in the beginning of my YouTube foray were wild and…varied. Now as my algorithm has calmed, I have found my favorite content and ads have become predictable. Long live the skip button.