TubeYous

¡Hey, guys! It's Tom. I just watched a video by Crazy Mammal that I wanted to talk about because it captured something for me about what I do here, and I think what maybe many of us do here. So there was a phrase at the end of Crazy Mamel's video where she said, talking about why she's here on YouTube, where she talked about how she does things here that she doesn't do in real life. And, you know, I'm a psychologist, so when I hear phrases like that, it really really piques my interest. And so I started thinking about, you know, is this real life or is this not real life? What is real life? What isn't real life? And of course this is real life, right? You know, we're really here, we're really talking to one another, we're making videos, we're posting them for other people to see, and we know that other people are seeing them. It's not like, you know, this isn't Candid Camera. You know, we're doing this intentionally. We're making these videos for one another. Uh, are we making them for one another? Um, are we making them for ourselves? Are we making them— yes, I am. I'm making them for you, whoever you are. I don't know who you are. And I'm also making them for me. Part of what I'm doing here is for me, right? I mean, I must be getting something out of this or I wouldn't do it. We don't do things that we don't get something out of. What am I getting out of it? So I think part of what we get out of it has to do with the nature of ourselves. So what do I mean? What's a self? What's, what's a self? Myself. You, you know, you. Who are you? Why are you, right? This is called YouTube, right? So it's— there's a you here in YouTube. Which you is here? That's a silly question, but somehow it's not silly because we, we start to recognize when we're here that something that we all know implicitly anyway, which is there are a lot of yous that are in here, right? And so we all know, for example, that when we go to work, we're somebody different. We always say, well, you know, that's me at work, but that's not really me. That's not really me, that there's a really me that lives somehow behind the me that's at work. Because we recognize that there are profiles and aspects of ourselves that we reveal at work that at the same time conceal other parts of ourselves that aren't appropriate at work. Or we're not comfortable being at work. And so we know that there are, you know, with our good friends, with our— you see the thing I'm doing with my hands, this kind of concentric circles emanating out from the core of me is kind of this sense of ourselves that we have, that we carry around as sort of our everyday concept of who we are in the world. That I'm a person, a unitary kind of self that, you know, kind of goes out in the world and confronts situations and interacts with those situations in ways that are consistent and yet distinctive. In some kinds of situations, I'm like this. In other kinds of situations, I'm like that. What does that have to do with YouTube? Well, here we're in a new kind of situation. We're in a situation where we, as Crazyman will put it, you know, gets to kind of be part of herself that she doesn't get to be in her day-to-day life. Um, and I think that's a great part of the appeal that we find here. On YouTube. We get to be parts of ourselves that we don't normally get to be, that are fun for us to be, or that are somehow valuable for us to be. They have some value. They mean something to us to be able to be these parts of ourselves that we don't normally get to be in our day-to-day lives. I know I make videos here that are stupid and fun because I want to— because I am sometimes stupid. I'm stupid enough that that's a part of myself that I enjoy living in. I enjoy being in the neighborhood of when I'm being stupid because I have fun there. I enjoy that part of myself. I enjoy the part of myself that gets to think about things in the way that I'm thinking about things now. I get to— I enjoy the parts of myself that I explore when I do videos about traveling in New York City and showing people what New York City is like. But all of these parts, these are all me. They're all contained inside this self that I understand is both unitary and at the same time complex. And I think we are now in a time when we are encouraged to explore this multiplicity of selves in ways that maybe are, if not distinct in human history, at least being encouraged more than at other times in human history. You know, there was a time when, like I talked about in the, in the age video, when like, you know, you had to act your age. I didn't use the phrase there, but you know, you had to act your age. You had to do things that you— you also then had to act yourself. You had to be this kind of, you know, if you were the role that you inhabited, you had to completely— if you were dad, you had to be dad. And dads didn't do certain kinds of things, didn't do them. And dads did do other kinds of things. Well, what do we know? We know that we now are exploring all sorts of different ways. There's a lot, a lot of different ways to be dad today. There's a lot of ways to be everything today, and, uh, we now are no longer confined by some of those, uh, very tight definitions of who we have to be because of what we are. And here we get a chance to sort of celebrate those different parts of ourselves and be those different parts of ourselves in public quasi-public, right? We're not really in public, we are in public, we're not in public. And I think that's a huge part of what's going on here that has made this such an appealing place for us to share with one another. You know, I've been blogging for almost 3 years, and that was a great revelation in terms of revealing myself in public. I had never done anything like that before. And then I started to blog and I was writing about my ideas, and that was a big deal. Then I started to podcast, and that was also a big— you know, hearing your voice, you know, we all have that experience— was a big deal. And now the next level of revelation of actually sort of being here talking to you all, whoever you are, You know, right there in the vividness of video is another level of how we are allowing ourselves to be much more of this multiplicity, this dynamic set of selves that we are in the world today. So thanks, Crazy Mammal, for help, for triggering these thoughts, and, um, I look forward to seeing all the TubeUs, uh, that are out there, or that are in there, uh, for all of us soon. Thanks. Bye-bye.