YOUTUBE is being touted as the second largest search engine in the world (behind Google) according to any quick Google search and there’s nor reason to presume that’s not the case. The reality of that effective, choice seeking, as a consumer of personalised content, is even more juicy and fun than a dry declaration of success suggests.
The YouTube “recommends” section on your homepage provides the pleasure of learning and growing your insight on the world like never before through personalised AI or algorithims. Hours of highly professional, high budget, documentary and film from everywhere on the globe and every period of history imaginable bringing a new high and accuracy on discerning taste and craving for knowledge. I can’t get enough of it.
It provides more insight and knowledge than your mind can guess at until you look for yourself. Forget the crass stereotype of goofy YouTube millionaire stars doing amusing pranks for the under 12s while selling hair gel products. Teenage angst vlogs or middle aged diy tips, useful gardening ideas or drug bust adventures, is what you get if that’s what you choose to view. Think again – it’s what you make it.
A marketing guide to how the Youtube algorithims work
shopify on getting more views on YouTube
Personally I studied and briefly taught Sociology of media at earlier stages of my life, as well as trained in local print journalism – which strives to arm you with self awareness about your own cultural biases and background as well as clueing you up to the bias of writers and journalists.
If you combine YouTube personalised algorithims with books and print journalism with proven integrity and professionalism over time, with trusted, informed individual campaigners, hopefully you have enough insight about yourself too – you can really add something to your life. In politics, history and musical content. For a guitar tutor and musician YouTube is an amazing resource. In the lockdown it’s a joy.
How do I mean?
In February I was browsing in Big Island Bookshop, on Waianuenue Avenue, on the island of Hilo in Hawaii, with its black,volcanic sands, wiry trees and famous tsunamis. I had a few hours off from the cruise where I was working as a musician and I wanted to feel some mental escape from its intense, claustrophobic controlled world.
I knew from a previous cruise that this bookshop would be all chilled out like a 90s New Age aromatherapy massage venue. It would effeversc with a claimed spiritual vibe and it reminded me of places I’d been to on the island of Anglesey in North Wales. Places only 2 or 3 hours drive from Preston that now felt like a long lost home.
No surprise then that I should pick up a book called “Lakota Woman” written by one Mary Crow Dog with an emphaisis on the cultural repression of native Americans, the brutal neglect and history of murder and documenting the activities of a US protest group in the 70s – the American Indian Movement.
It had a late 80s/early 90s zeal for the power of nature and maternalism as well as a punk rebel feel, so no surprise that director Oliver Stone was quoted on the back describing this second hand, musty paperback as “A piercing look into the ancient yet modern mind of a Sioux woman”.
It wasn’t the best read ever, informed, passionate but sometimes stilted. However, back in England, it slowly filled my lockdown literacy desires before I next devoured Blondie’s artpoprock New York history in Deborah Harry’s “Face It” in a couple of days.
Better still, was following up the world and times described in the book, more visually on YouTube – watching snippets of 70s court cases, witness interviews on shootouts between Native American activists and the FBI, enjoying gentle and loving documentaries about life on 21st reservations and films on the cruel history, repression and genocide of the American west. All from my YouTube recommends.
I did the same thing with the history of the Vietnam war, World War Two and combined with Netflix and Amazon Prime, I studied the ferocious detail of the impact of the British Empire on its nearest neighbour, Ireland. A subject that has obssessed me for life as it’s my father’s upbringing and provides the language, music, poetry and soul of my own upbringing in the north of England. It’s where my surname comes from and my family genes originate in Donegal, in the north of Ireland. So it matters to me.
That s just the tip of the cultural iceberg, so to speak, for a use of a combination of media outlets. For news you can mix Channel 4 News broadcasts with HBO’s Vice News and the New York Times online while following the likes of investigative and heroic researcher/writers such as Naomi Klein or Carole Cadwalladr.
There’s no need to be smothered in random spotify playlists or the sometimes amateurish self promotion of local troubadours on Facebook in a world devoid of Top of the Pops or the offline NME – no need to be drowned in somebody else’s tastes marketed at you until you feel flat with an entire genre. We can personalise our own tastes.
YouTube can fill that gap. On my TV, YouTube, has provided me with my favourite music artists of 2020 whether they are bringing out new releases today or albums that I’ve missed from 40 plus years ago. It’s rendered me emotionally involved with brand new sounds and songs for the first time in years.
And sometimes, if you want to check out National Geographic or American Experience, as examples, you can allow yourself to be seduced by the full romance of a journey through time to the soothing tones of your favourite acting professionals.
So yes I rcommend getting into YouTube Recommends and making sure the ap is accessible through the internet on your TV – combined with Amazon Prime, Netflix, a print newspaper, books and real life walks in nature – it’s the business.
The good coffee? This morning Ipamena from Brazil, freshly ground and acquired from Coffee Exchange – a small chain of Lancashire coffee houses that still provides beans on delivery. Awesome.
Mike Kneafsey
https://musicworkersdiary.wordpress.com/
afterthemill 