Breathless navel gazing. It's not that he's wrong, it's just that this article adds nothing new to the conversation other than excessively technical mumbo jumbo. Just read MrBeast's original document.
In the belly of the MrBeast
101–110 of 410 posts
Re: In the belly of the MrBeast
#102> The ideal creator has no distance between themselves and their persona. They have been interpellated by audience metrics; their subjective experience already takes audience reactions into account. Isn't this sort of one of the themes from The Prestige(2006)? That certain magicians were so dedicated to their craft that they became inseparable from it. The performance never actually stopped
One of the problems with modern social media (and digital media in general) is that this is now happening, to some extent, to everyone. This is particularly a problem for children, who are exposed to this so early that they may never internalize the difference between existence and performance.
Bo Burnham said it really well in an interview:
"I'm saying I feel very stressed because I feel like I'm on stage panicking in front of thousands of people... and I feel like I'm trapped within a performance and I'm freaking out because of it. And 13-year-olds were going 'yeah yeah, I feel like that every day'. And I go 'what are you talking about?' and I realize that the stresses of a C-list comedian were democratized and given to an entire generation.... Social media has made life a performance."
I'm not sure where the original interview is, but I found the quote at 9:43 of this analysis of Inside: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHat1OlMPeY
Re: In the belly of the MrBeast
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Baudrillard just gets more relevant every day. Honestly I find it hard to imagine how someone could have media literacy in the modern day without coming to an intuitive understanding of semiotics, whether they know it or not!
I find the ideas of Baudrillard really accurate in describing some parts of modern life, but to be honest I feel like he just saying random stuff when I tried to read one of his book. It's so metaphorical and abstract it's very difficult to understand what exactly he is saying.
My best experience reading Baudrillard was out loud with a group. Some passages spoke to some but not others, but most generated discussion. Some are also obvious to us now in the TikTok age - uncannily so.
Re: In the belly of the MrBeast
#104Really liked this sentence:
"YouTubers are not “Creators” but Creations. Audiences, rationalized by the platform, and the vloggers who upload the videos those audiences consume are not separable either theoretically or empirically."
Re: In the belly of the MrBeast
#105Interesting experience to read an essay of such insight regarding a subject that is the opposite of insight. Best thing I’ve read this week. I am happy to say I have never seen a Mr. Beast video, and now I will be sure never to see one in the future.
"YouTubers" are one of those things that a lot of people are interested in, yet everything I learn about them makes me not want to start. The world has so much good film, music, novels, even video games and TV - in a choice between any of those and watching a YouTuber, why would anyone choose the latter?
I mean, there certainly is a genre of "YouTuber", but there's lots of quality content. I just enjoyed a little 20 minute history of the Panasonic 3DO console that I managed to never hear about before.
Re: In the belly of the MrBeast
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
10? We’ve been getting steadily more polarized since at least the 80s.
So basically since when cable TV came into mainstream existence.
I think you're confusing the issue. Cable TV wasn't coming into mainstream that was the problem. The issue was the 1996 Telecommunications Act that was the starting gun.
Re: In the belly of the MrBeast
#107> and I confess that I feel vindicated by the analytic approach in the book I feel the opposite, everything seems reasonable, business-centric, and marketing-aware strategies.
Isn't that the point? By purely focussing on business-centric strategies, the videos no longer have meaning.
This presumes that MrBeast intended to create "videos with meaning" in the first place.
In his defense (!?), most of what's churned out by the streaming platforms, hollywood, and the music industry, is also not very bothered by lack of meaning.
Re: In the belly of the MrBeast
#108Watching YouTube anonymously with different browsers and cycling VPNs frequently, I see it quickly ends up suggesting the same videos during the same week. Not similar videos but the same ones. Many of those videos are below 1M and not particularly notable. This is after only watching a couple of videos and those videos are different every session. Either it has some magic fingerprinting I am not aware of (and I go t…
I find that going into your history and removing offending videos that seem to be driving the algorithm is more effective than using the "not interested" option on newly recommended videos
Yes. Forgot about it. I keep the history clean, too. But it's only fractionally better.
Re: In the belly of the MrBeast
#109At the top of the heap (Mr Beast, Nastya, Ryan, etc), this is true: > The ideal creator has no distance between themselves and their persona. They have been interpellated by audience metrics; their subjective experience already takes audience reactions into account. > Or more simply, YouTubers are not “Creators” but Creations. Audiences, rationalized by the platform, and the vloggers who upload the videos those audie…
> YouTubers are not “Creators” but Creations
This is such a broad and general statement for a platform that is unfathomably big.
I don't any of the mass market Mr Beast, Nastya, Ryan videos on my feed. At all. I get smaller (but still large) creators with videos that actually engage the mind. Example: https://www.youtube.com/@blancolirio
But I guess that's the distinction between a Youtuber and Creator.
Re: In the belly of the MrBeast
#110First of all – the essay is phenomenal and his book is available online for free – https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/youtube-apparatus/36... > “Communication within the YouTube Apparatus has no meaning.” The rapid feedback loop between creators and audiences (as constructed by platform metrics) means that the system more and more responds to itself. Rather than trying to go somewhere (as is the case with politi…
For people confused like me on what intensification means, it means maximizing the amount of attention and interaction that occurs. On Youtube this would be the metrics that drive engagement, including views, likes, comments, shares, and watch time. The issue is that the content focuses on driving engagement at the expense of communicating ideas with coherence and depth, for example by sensationalizing or oversimplif…
I think the above commentor is right, in my opinion, intensification shapes our world into being very reactionary, with only a superficial understanding of issues
In fairness, this is how the world has always been.
In the US for instance, back when there were only 3 networks and a channel for public tv, people were "reactionary, with only a superficial understanding of issues".