How YouTube Eats Your Life
So I’ve been YouTubing for 3 months. Where has the time gone?
That’s not a trivial question.
In my e-book Unfashionably Late, I talk about how the cost of using blogs increases over time. What is true of blogs is true of all social media, but especially of YouTube. As with blogs, the problem is that a person who is likely to be interesting is also somebody who’s interested, possibly to the point of being easily distracted.
And YouTube offers more ways to be distracted than any other social medium. It offers stimuli and feedback loops in a great variety of time frames. You can converse with friends in chat rooms called “streams” where the feedback is nearly instant. Or you can make videos, and for months afterward watch the views and ratings they receive.
So whether it is quick or slow feedback that draws you, it’s there, along with everything in between—along with that essential element of gambling addiction, randomness.
You can make friends as a way of getting attention, and then find that you lavish attention on your friends at great cost in time.
In my own case, I chose to hitch my own fame to a rising star, LisaNova, and planned to have my first two videos mention her, as a way of riding her popularity. Since then, there has been so much drama surrounding Lisa, with a virtual lynch mob calling for her elimination from YouTube, that I can’t help wanting to follow it.
Worse, I get involved in it. From being a thoroughly fake friendship by means of which, in my first video, I made a trifling joke about YouTube friendship, I have had a lot of communication with Lisa and find myself truly liking and respecting her, more so with each passing week. So I’m very tempted to make videos defending her against the mob.
There is still the little pragmatic voice in my head, asking if it will be worth the time and effort to stay involved in the Lisa controversy. But that voice gets increasingly distant as the charms of YouTube take over. Who cares if it’s worth it, I just wanna do it. I wanna! I wanna! I wanna!
It’s good for me now and then to re-read Unfashionably Late. My own words remind me that I’m using social media for very practical purposes, as part of my business. Also, they remind me of the dangers of being seduced by social media and failing to count the cost.
Social media are potentially very powerful business tools. Unfashionably Late lays out some of the difficulties of using them for business (or any other kind of personal advancement.) It remains for me to work out the solutions to the difficulties.
YouTube will be a superb testbed in which to seek these solutions, precisely because the dangers of blogs are not only all present in YouTube, but multiplied.
Here on the Alpha Mind blog, in the coming weeks I’ll lay out what I’m learning in the YouTube world, and apply the lessons to blogging. I hope that for my readers who use thought leadership as a linchpin of their marketing mix, the benefit, in learning to use social media effectively, will be great.
