Youtube and Jellybeans

Let a Feral Ramble commence:

One of the most interesting aspects of having an active Youtube channel is the interactions in the comment feed. I’ve learned a lot from people in mine, whether being corrected on things I got wrong or having additional information brought up. The recommendations have been great, I have a lifetime supply of new things to read and watch and so far it’s been great stuff that I’d either never heard of or simply never picked up.

But it is the internet, so there’s also the trolls (who can actually be quite funny) and what I think of as “net-wraiths”- broken souls that wander the web looking for meaning by insulting people but lacking the wit to do it well. And they’ve helped me crystallize an idea.

Say, for example, you walk into an office. Your boss, a Professor, the President of the United States, doesn’t matter. Some people absorb vast amounts of information from the room. How well kept is it? What books are on the shelves and often more important, is it a real collection of books that the owner reads or just curated décor? What kind of desk clutter is there? Is it a lived-in space or just a setpiece? Do I smell anything? What does this space tell me about the person I’m talking to within it?

And some people just notice the bowl of jellybeans on the desk and wait for a good opportunity to grab some.

Almost any piece of media is going to have the narrative equivalent of a bowl of jellybeans in it, a colorful and obvious object that draws the eye but really doesn’t have much to do with anything else in the room. People will comment on the jellybeans, complain that they’re stale, gripe about the tackiness of a bowl of them being there at all . . . But if the jellybeans weren’t there it wouldn’t change anything about the room or what goes on inside it.

In my case, it’s usually a grossly oversimplified quip on the much more complex topic being discussed. Something said off-hand without much thought. But then I noticed that on certain videos, almost all of the hostile comments were about that one thing, the metaphorical jellybeans.

So now I occasionally put one in just to see if anyone grabs a handful. No obnoxious shock-jock nonsense trying to provoke people (which I find incredibly tedious) but just a shorthand comment within the more complex idea being discussed.

It’s partly a social experiment, but mostly I find it useful as a weather-vane for the coherence of the argument. If a lot of comments come at my core argument with counterpoints, I know I didn’t think it through enough, it’s a reminder to go back to that topic in more depth and also to not be too fast and loose with hot-takes.

But if they’re all griping about the jellybeans, it’s a good sign that the substance of the work is solid.

I offer this as a reminder to anyone, whether with an online presence, a writer getting notes from beta readers, grad students with feedback on their dissertations, anything where your work is subjected to critical analysis. If all the critics are focused on the jellybeans, you probably made your point well. Then you can put the bowl in a drawer and confidently go forward with the rest of it.