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Critically engaging with YouTube
Who you trust to give you information says as much about you as it does about the source of that information. Over lockdown I got into YouTube content, first for my hobbies, then with history, and now with more general purpose content. What I have noticed over the last two years is that once you get past a certain point most content is pretty much surface level that is recycled by a legion of content creators jumping on popular content. Content creators with large subscriber bases often go into one of two directions, shorter surface level videos or longer form content that critically engages with a subject. For me as a consumer of that content, and as a writer, I am aware of this, especially when I force myself to critically engage with what I am consuming. It has got to the point where I am actively unsubscribing from channels that I previously enjoyed because the creator is either mispresenting content or does nothing more than churn out the equivalent of fast food that does not satisfy.
Critical engagement matters because what you engage with is spending your time, the only thing you can never get back. Not everything must be highbrow, indeed having frivolity is part of enjoying life. I enjoy the Unsubscribe podcast because it provokes me and helps me see the world from a right-wing point-on-view, with the ability to turn off the content once it becomes problematic. At no point would…
