<\/p>\n
The multicolored slurry of user generated content that for years has been successfully netting millions of kids\u2019 eyeballs on YouTube by remixing popular cartoon characters to crudely act out keyword search scenarios leered into wider public view this week, after writer James Bridle penned a scathing Medium post<\/a>\u00a0arguing the content represents \u201ca kind of violence inherent in the combination of digital systems and capitalist incentives\u201d.<\/p>\n What do you get if you endlessly recombine Spiderman and the Joker with Elsa from Frozen<\/em> and lashings of product placement for junk food brands like McDonalds?<\/p>\n A lot of views on YouTube, clearly. And thus a very modern form of children\u2019s \u2018entertainment\u2019 that can clearly only exist on a vast, quality-uncontrolled, essentially unregulated, algorithmically incentivized advertising platform with a very low barrier to entry for content creators, which judges the resulting UGC purely on whether it can lift itself out of the infinite supply of visual soup by getting views \u2014 and do so by being expert at pandering to populist childish cravings, the keyword search criteria that best express them and the algorithms that automatically rank the content.<\/p>\n This is effectively \u2014 if not yet literally \u2014 media programming by SEO-optimized robots.<\/p>\n And, as Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1964, the medium is<\/em> the message<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2026 because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. The content or uses of such media are as diverse as they are ineffectual in shaping the form of human association. Indeed, it is only too typical that the \u201ccontent\u201d of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium. It is only today that industries have become aware of the various kinds of business in which they are engaged. When IBM discovered that it was not in the business of making office equipment or business machines, but that it was in the business of processing information, then it began to navigate with clear vision.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Insofar as kids are concerned, the message being generated via YouTube\u2019s medium is frequently nonsensical; a mindless and lurid slurry of endlessly repurposed permutations of pilfered branded content, played out against an eerie blend of childish tunes, giddily repeating nursery rhymes, and crude cartoon sound effects.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a literal pantomime of the stuff kids might think to search for. And it speaks volumes about the dysfunctional incentives that define the medium.<\/p>\n After the latest outcry about disturbing UGC intentionally targeting kids on YouTube, Google has said it will\u00a0implement new policies<\/a>\u00a0to age-restrict this type of content to try to prevent it ending up in the YouTube Kids app, though a prior policy forbidding \u201cinappropriate use of family characters\u201d clearly hasn\u2019t\u00a0stemmed the low-brow flow of pop-culture soup.<\/p>\n The\u00a0maniacal laughter that appears to be the signature trope of this \u2018genre\u2019 at least seems appropriate.<\/p>\n McLuhan\u2019s point was that content is intrinsically shaped by the medium through which we obtain it. And that it\u2019s mediums themselves which have the power to enact structural change by reconfiguring how humans act and associate en masse.<\/p>\n The mindless cartoon noise mesmerizing kids on YouTube might be the best visual example of that argument yet. Even if\u00a0McLuhan thought analyzing content itself would merely distract from appropriate critical analysis of mediums.<\/p>\n All you have to do is imagine the unseen other half of these transactions: Aka all those unmoving toddlers staring into screens as they consume hours and hours of junk soup.<\/p>\n The thriving existence of such awful stuff, devised with the sole intent of generating high volumes of ad revenue by being structured so as to be likely to be surfaced via search and recommendation algorithms, is also a perfect example of how the content humans can be most easily persuaded to consume (aka clickbait) and the stuff that might be most intellectually profitable for them to consume are two very different things.<\/p>\n Algorithmically organized mega platforms like YouTube may host quality content but are expert at incentivizing the creation and consumption of clickbait \u2014 thanks to ad-targeting business models that are fed by recommendation systems which monitor user inputs and actions to identify the most clickable and thus most addictive stuff to keep feeding them.<\/p>\n\n