Cranking out 1 video per week isn’t an issue if you are a full time YouTuber. I am not. I do a lot of other things. So it’s been a challenge for me to do a video each week, but it’s definitely fun. I’m a ham and I like to talk about guitars and stuff.
I knew that my early videos would not be my best work – I’ve never done this before, so I’m learning as I go. Like most new channels, I’m sort of trying to figure out the best kind of videos to make. I have a list of over 100 video ideas, so there’s no shortage of things to cover. But I’m still trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t, what’s interesting and what’s boring, what’s funny and what isn’t.
And if I’m honest, I had to think about Officer Tony Woods. He’s sort of the puppet mascot of the channel, the grizzled grumpy video editor who can poke fun at me and my goofiness. As I type this, there are all kinds of protests happening all over the world as the result of an American police officer slowly murdering a black suspect in public while three other officers watched. All four officers are currently under arrest.
My channel is tiny. As of right now, I only have 55 subscribers. So I don’t need to worry yet about people being angry that I have a police officer puppet on my channel, or getting angry if I feature him too much or not enough. I’m under the radar and I can do what I want without political tribalism causing half my audience to get mad. Tensions are high right now. My channel wasn’t made to express political satire. I think Tony’s character is funny. I’m not changing him. I have another puppet who will eventually be introduced, and we will eventually learn Tony’s back story.
Right now, lots of people in my country are choosing to only pay attention to news sources and social groups who reinforce their own beliefs. And they’re in denial about it. If they watch Fox News or MSNBC News, they’re getting a one-sided view of what’s happening. It’s very dangerous. To each party, the people in the other party are villains. All news contains human bias, because it’s writen by humans. But instead of Fox or MSNBC, it would benefit Americans to go to less biased news sources like apnews.com and pbs.org. While not perfect, they consistently rank as being more trusted by the American public than other sources.
Did you ever read the Doctor Seuss book about the star bellies? There are two groups of creatures in the book – those with stars on their bellies, and those without. In the story, a man comes along with a machine that can add or remove stars. The two groups of beings grow to hate each other, and the man profits from adding or removing stars from bellies. At the end, he laughs his way down the road with all of their money, leaving the creatures wondering what happened.
Facebook is the man with the machine here – their clever computer programs can use AI to determine which stories will get people riled up, and they make a fortune by showing different content to different groups, all with the goal of keeping them engaged in Facebook. The longer they have attention, the more money they can make. This isn’t conjecture – it’s part of their business model. For every high profile hate group they take down, there are hundreds more they ignore. Crazy fake stories are shown to hundreds of thousands of people – in some cases Facebook will tag the story and in come cases they won’t.
But I’m way off topic. I was talking about Tony.
Anyway… it’s really hard to keep my politics out of this website. But I don’t like the political tribalism I’m seeing in the US. Too much us vs. them, too much hate. I’m sick of hate. We’ve seen two big important movements in the US semi-recently – the Me Too movement and the Black Lives Matter movement. History is watching us. Some people are going to end up on the wrong side of history. But I think Officer Tony Woods puts it best, so I leave you with his catch phrase: “Aw Geez!”
