Danukem, on 04 July 2021 - 10:19 PM, said:
Well in this particular case you have a YouTuber with a self defense channel who specializes in testing out martial arts claims, and who is no doubt on the constant lookout for content ideas because he's trying to make a living at it. I'm sure it's hard to come up with different ideas for videos every day and keep it fresh, but people who try to make a living at it are pretty much required to, which is one reason there are so many reaction videos out there.
In the martial arts world, just about any idea no matter how ludicrous has been seriously proposed or taught at some point. Even though the original video using a lighter for self defense wasn't serious, you can bet there are people out there who have thought of the idea independently and are probably teaching it in a self defense seminar somewhere. So for that reason I would say it can still be worthwhile topic for a video.
As for the effort asymmetry -- the phenomon of one person making a small effort to create something which large numbers of other people then spend a lot of time and effort to disect, disseminate, and appreciate, etc. -- that seems to be the normal way of things for anything of cultural value, whether its an invention, a work of art or a meme. What's different about modern memes is that it's now usually possible to *identify* the source and see exactly how it spread, how much effort went into creating it, and so on. Before the internet this was much more difficult. Even famous inventions were often misattributed (ok they still are, but at least now the competing histories are more well known).
https://youtu.be/5W3kALD-GtY?t=88
But it's funny, this newfound pressure of always having to find fresh content and basically renew yourself (even if just for the sake of it) all the time, just to stay on your audience's radar. Now, creators have always had to do that (and would always evolve along time anyway, regardless of a system although maybe in different directions then), but never really at a pace as frenetic as nowadays', with so much urgency that if you stop showing activity for a week then your audience visibly declines (also because direct competition is more explicit than ever in those fields, if we're talking business and not artistic terms).
The upside is now we're getting all those singular sources of sometimes extremely niche information as opposed to being restricted to the official, something directly curated by industrials and tailor-fit to their best interest, and so we have access to a greater array of truth; the downside is as a whole, we may be losing the necessary focus, time and energy to further develop ideas, including the interesting ones, as we keep being bombarded and obsessed with the newest as though just as many distractions. Occasionally, we also end up feeling negative energies and frustrations as a direct consequence to the stress but by that time we've already forgotten where they come from (and logically blame it on ourselves, when we're not necessarily personally at fault).
Now I'm not familiar with what that YouTuber in particular does and so it would be silly of me to argue their seriousness at all, but in the bigger picture general quality and substance of interpersonal communication seems to suffer as a result, messages lose their weight, what is so grand in using your voice if it's to make a billionth reaction or unboxing video, how really purposeful to humanity are those words at the end of the day over a fart in the wind if you know what I mean? I think I remember you once (rightfully) saying that one's creative resources were finite (or at least could be temporarily exhausted), that would sort of parallel what I mean here even on the author's end. Sure with constant stress, you can keep squeezing more and more juice out of a soul but it's only going to be that mature with the more you over do it. I feel like this modern pressure has a lot to do with impulses, too; just like social media doping dopamine levels via the anonymous validation of one's nothingness, people have gotten addicted to this rhythm that's constantly accelerating and ironically, they seem to hate it and be tired of it just as much as they keep craving it. And in the end, a lot of 'content' (sometimes very successfully) gets around being appreciated as 'content', but not always for its intrinsic value. Seems like a cool gimmick for entrepreneurs to bank on short term, but when it comes to the long term effect on the culture I'm quite split.
I can see what you mean with how in martial arts (or really any art?) most people never waited for the Internet to seriously experiment and theorize with the wildest stuff, of course the Internet has made that more apparent but I'd also say that eventually, in turn, it encouraged if not normalized the trend (which again I believe qualifies as progress there). I remember a few years back running into a self-defense video with very detailed instructions on how to properly use a skateboard as a defensive weapon, which I thought was pretty amazing (in most real-life scenarii where you would have to do something like that, a.k.a. practically never, 99.9% of the time one's reaction would be to swing the object around like a primate with zero conscious thought of what exactly it is that they're doing; now, this guy had derived his own mini-martial art out of it).
About the effort asymmetry, regardless of how common it is (or maybe especially because of how common it is) I still think it's key to many cool things to ponder, if only to realize how accessible everything really can be in this world as long as you know which are the (few, very) right strings to pull, and also to constantly reevaluate how much you're being a victim on the daily.
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