Is Youtube a Waste of My Time? (Hint: No.)
30 December 2015 [link youtube]
The answer is "no", and this video provides 10 minutes of reflections on the relative meaningfulness of the digital monologue (in my life and, perhaps, in yours?).
Youtube Automatic Transcription
hey part of the secret to why I look
exhausted on this YouTube channel so often is that I generally do record youtube videos only when I am too tired to warn down too exhausted to be doing something more productive with my time right now if I were not so worn down this is what I would be doing with my time this is a course to teach yourself Japanese that is taught in the German language does this Japan ish in dry ticket tagging module else he'll sprocket so that would be practicing German while I'm learning Japanese to be honest with you after I stopped recording this video I'm going to try I've got to put some more energy into this right now it is the evening here but i have to be up at 5am to get on train train takes me to an airplane airplane takes me to a boat it's going to be a horrendous day tomorrow and I may not sleep all night actually this is a strange illustration of one aspect of why YouTube is not a waste of my time because it is something you can do at any time but i am going to give a little bit more of a profound set of reflections hear about the ways in which youtube is not a waste of your time and it's actually something quite meaningful on my resume on my CV I list that I gave a lecture at Oxford University England formal academic lecture I gave another lecture at so as University of London totally different the actual text what was presented to those two original material for those two lectures you can definitely get the text for the Oxford lecture on the internet right now by going to including on it when I speak on YouTube whether it's scripted or unscripted I'm going to post a link here to an example of one of my videos here on my youtube channel that is scripted where I wrote a lecture in advance and performed it on microphone so to speak when I record and upload something here reliably 200 people will see it who are really interested that's whether i'm talking about veganism buddhism politics of china any other topic sooner or later that's going to get around to an audience of shall we say humbly 200 people some of my youtube videos have reached more than a thousand i think a couple of my videos have reached 10,000 people but not all the people who click on a video or really interested really want to hear it so we're going to use a conservative estimate here at say 200 people when i gave those lectures in person at Oxford University and University of London there were vastly fewer than 200 people and even though the people who are they are going to be polite to you many of them will be there for the wrong reasons it happens to me happens to everyone you go to a lecture on the basis of seeing the title seeing a little bit of information not really knowing what it's going to be about or maybe you go to a lecture because your girlfriend wants to go you go to lecture because a friend of yours tracks you along necessarily the number of people in the audience is much fewer and the number of people who really wanted to hear that content is only going to be a small subset of that audience and the wonderful thing about YouTube is that my content can sit here until the people who are really interested in hearing it happen to find it now I also used to work as an editor an editor of nonfiction in the publishing industry publishing books and we publish books written by university professors all sorts of people but predominantly academics researchers and various kinds if we had a book that sold 500 copies that was a hit book if we had a book that sold 500 copies in its first year that was a smash hit book and those were books on history politics languages the reason why I was an editor there was that they were books about the sorts of things that interest me the first thing to talk about on this YouTube channel quite frankly um now admittedly a YouTube video is not a book but in some ways as a method of communication this is more meaningful and it brings about much better results in your life that lecture I gave at Oxford what positive results came out of it really nothing it sits on my resume as an accomplishment did I make a single friend from giving that lecture note do I make friends by speaking YouTube yes I make real friends in real life to this YouTube channel that's one of my main reasons for putting time and effort into having a web presence at all I often say to people what i'm doing here is not really activism any more than having a conversation with someone who you happen to meet at a coffee shop can be called activism a large part of what i'm doing here is just talking to friends past present and future someone may see this video five years from now who is my friend five years in the future who i haven't met yet that's kind of wonderful the lecture I gave at Oxford do you think my daughter is everybody care about that I have a two-year-old daughter you can see what she looks like on the same youtube channel she's not going to care about that but right now being able to look into my eyes through this camera see my strangely dishwater green eyes and have some sense of the man I was in this town my life that could indeed be meaningful to my daughter one day um I really feel that YouTube is not a waste of time both for all the reasons I just mentioned and because of the way you can dynamically fit it into your life at times when you can't be doing other forms of work I'm tempted of course to just end this video at that moment but I had a little bit more to say I do get email from people reflecting on how my work has changed their lives and although it's sometimes is about my written work it's very often in response to my youtube videos and very often I think they would not have read my written work if they didn't see the youtube video first so they make connection to the YouTube video then they look up and read my essays are looking to my background a bit further um I doubt that any of the lectures I've given in real life had that effect on people or if they did I never heard about it and with YouTube I have changed a few people's lives and I have heard about and one other interesting element is how different it is how fundamentally unpretentious it is for you to hear my voice and see the look in my eyes to this peculiar medium that makes a digital ghost out of all of us I had a lot of experience with the written word and while I did not grow up with a June belief in the power of the written word I think I was naive when I was younger in that I thought people took their time in reading something set out in writing and would get less emotionally distraught by it that they would respond more rationally simply because a written language forces us to slow down and think things through methodically and what I've learned as an adult is that the exact opposite is true there were such extreme reactions to what I wrote on peeper whether i was talking about buddhism veganism politics history and people used to react and cast all kinds of aspersions on my character and really kind of admit stories about me and described very strange motives to me and as soon as I started talking on YouTube all of that stopped the whole tone and tenor and content of how people reacted to me and my work in every field in every field I've commented on changed and change for the better and I don't know what that says about my fellow human beings the 21st century that people really did not want to believe in my humanity when they read the written word whether they responded to my writing by making me into a hero or by making into a villain the reactions were so extreme even when my own writing was completely unpretentious but I'm delighted to find that simply by using this medium simply by communicating with people through YouTube I've managed to somehow puncture those illusions
exhausted on this YouTube channel so often is that I generally do record youtube videos only when I am too tired to warn down too exhausted to be doing something more productive with my time right now if I were not so worn down this is what I would be doing with my time this is a course to teach yourself Japanese that is taught in the German language does this Japan ish in dry ticket tagging module else he'll sprocket so that would be practicing German while I'm learning Japanese to be honest with you after I stopped recording this video I'm going to try I've got to put some more energy into this right now it is the evening here but i have to be up at 5am to get on train train takes me to an airplane airplane takes me to a boat it's going to be a horrendous day tomorrow and I may not sleep all night actually this is a strange illustration of one aspect of why YouTube is not a waste of my time because it is something you can do at any time but i am going to give a little bit more of a profound set of reflections hear about the ways in which youtube is not a waste of your time and it's actually something quite meaningful on my resume on my CV I list that I gave a lecture at Oxford University England formal academic lecture I gave another lecture at so as University of London totally different the actual text what was presented to those two original material for those two lectures you can definitely get the text for the Oxford lecture on the internet right now by going to including on it when I speak on YouTube whether it's scripted or unscripted I'm going to post a link here to an example of one of my videos here on my youtube channel that is scripted where I wrote a lecture in advance and performed it on microphone so to speak when I record and upload something here reliably 200 people will see it who are really interested that's whether i'm talking about veganism buddhism politics of china any other topic sooner or later that's going to get around to an audience of shall we say humbly 200 people some of my youtube videos have reached more than a thousand i think a couple of my videos have reached 10,000 people but not all the people who click on a video or really interested really want to hear it so we're going to use a conservative estimate here at say 200 people when i gave those lectures in person at Oxford University and University of London there were vastly fewer than 200 people and even though the people who are they are going to be polite to you many of them will be there for the wrong reasons it happens to me happens to everyone you go to a lecture on the basis of seeing the title seeing a little bit of information not really knowing what it's going to be about or maybe you go to a lecture because your girlfriend wants to go you go to lecture because a friend of yours tracks you along necessarily the number of people in the audience is much fewer and the number of people who really wanted to hear that content is only going to be a small subset of that audience and the wonderful thing about YouTube is that my content can sit here until the people who are really interested in hearing it happen to find it now I also used to work as an editor an editor of nonfiction in the publishing industry publishing books and we publish books written by university professors all sorts of people but predominantly academics researchers and various kinds if we had a book that sold 500 copies that was a hit book if we had a book that sold 500 copies in its first year that was a smash hit book and those were books on history politics languages the reason why I was an editor there was that they were books about the sorts of things that interest me the first thing to talk about on this YouTube channel quite frankly um now admittedly a YouTube video is not a book but in some ways as a method of communication this is more meaningful and it brings about much better results in your life that lecture I gave at Oxford what positive results came out of it really nothing it sits on my resume as an accomplishment did I make a single friend from giving that lecture note do I make friends by speaking YouTube yes I make real friends in real life to this YouTube channel that's one of my main reasons for putting time and effort into having a web presence at all I often say to people what i'm doing here is not really activism any more than having a conversation with someone who you happen to meet at a coffee shop can be called activism a large part of what i'm doing here is just talking to friends past present and future someone may see this video five years from now who is my friend five years in the future who i haven't met yet that's kind of wonderful the lecture I gave at Oxford do you think my daughter is everybody care about that I have a two-year-old daughter you can see what she looks like on the same youtube channel she's not going to care about that but right now being able to look into my eyes through this camera see my strangely dishwater green eyes and have some sense of the man I was in this town my life that could indeed be meaningful to my daughter one day um I really feel that YouTube is not a waste of time both for all the reasons I just mentioned and because of the way you can dynamically fit it into your life at times when you can't be doing other forms of work I'm tempted of course to just end this video at that moment but I had a little bit more to say I do get email from people reflecting on how my work has changed their lives and although it's sometimes is about my written work it's very often in response to my youtube videos and very often I think they would not have read my written work if they didn't see the youtube video first so they make connection to the YouTube video then they look up and read my essays are looking to my background a bit further um I doubt that any of the lectures I've given in real life had that effect on people or if they did I never heard about it and with YouTube I have changed a few people's lives and I have heard about and one other interesting element is how different it is how fundamentally unpretentious it is for you to hear my voice and see the look in my eyes to this peculiar medium that makes a digital ghost out of all of us I had a lot of experience with the written word and while I did not grow up with a June belief in the power of the written word I think I was naive when I was younger in that I thought people took their time in reading something set out in writing and would get less emotionally distraught by it that they would respond more rationally simply because a written language forces us to slow down and think things through methodically and what I've learned as an adult is that the exact opposite is true there were such extreme reactions to what I wrote on peeper whether i was talking about buddhism veganism politics history and people used to react and cast all kinds of aspersions on my character and really kind of admit stories about me and described very strange motives to me and as soon as I started talking on YouTube all of that stopped the whole tone and tenor and content of how people reacted to me and my work in every field in every field I've commented on changed and change for the better and I don't know what that says about my fellow human beings the 21st century that people really did not want to believe in my humanity when they read the written word whether they responded to my writing by making me into a hero or by making into a villain the reactions were so extreme even when my own writing was completely unpretentious but I'm delighted to find that simply by using this medium simply by communicating with people through YouTube I've managed to somehow puncture those illusions