The Adventure of the Prototype Vlogger
In recent months, I've seen this blog bleed into the real world. Real life people have come up to me and commented on something I've written. I find it more than a little perplexing that people have any interest in my witterings.
Don't get me wrong, I'm always happy to be given a compliment. Indeed, in the last week or so I've been complimented on all sorts of things. This is of course lovely but I never know how to respond to a compliment. I mean, obviously I should just say "thank you" yet somehow that rarely ends up happening and I end up just saying "yes". I worry this makes me come across as big-headed as if I think that said compliment is a given, when in actual fact I'm not saying thank you mainly because I'm so baffled by the concept of anyone thinking something that I'm doing is any good. If you are one of the complimenters, I apologise for my awkwardness and am profoundly grateful.
It's not the first time my online life has leaked into my real life.
During my teenage years the internet as we know it today was invented and I was there at the forefront, being the first person I knew to join every social network. Back in the early noughties, in my home town at least, the internet for young teenagers was something only used for homework. I could only find about fifteen friends on Myspace and one of them was Tom from Myspace. Next along was Bebo and that was the social network that made me fall in love with the possibilities of the internet. More people I knew were getting involved and I loved how you could personalise your profile in so many ways to make it uniquely yours.
Then Facebook appeared and suddenly everyone was joining it. I never liked it as much as Bebo but it took off, probably thanks to it's simplicity. Then Twitter turned up and I was the first person I knew to join it and Stephen Fry was the only celebrity using it. It was hugely fun before all the racists and trolls turned up. All the while I had MSN messenger open too and would be having inane conversations with my friends- several people I used to chat with for hours and hours were people I'd only met once or twice in reality.
During all this, I got into vlogging. I find it weird that over a decade on and that's a fairly common word that most people understand. Vloggers make huge amounts of money and become celebrities in their own right. It's become the main way many pre-teens consume media. It's a mile away from where I started when vlogging wasn't even a word.
It all began when I started playing with Windows Movie Maker and I produced a little video introducing myself and various parts of my life. This was before I owned a laptop with a camera and whilst my phone did have a camera it had about four pixels. So I'd basically created a slide show of images with me talking over the top of them. One of these images was a photo of my ex-girlfriend who had only ended the relationship fairly recently. In my narration, which was completely unplanned, I repeated a sexual joke about my ex that someone had said to me and thought nothing much of it at the time.
I continued to make videos and gradually they became at least a little more sophisticated. I produced a low pixel found footage horror film and talked about things I had been up to. Eventually I purchased a USB webcam and my videos became more like the sort of vlogs you might find online today. For the first few months no-one was really watching my videos but they are on my various social media profiles and gradually began to be discovered. The moment that really gained interest amongst my peers was that sexual joke.
I had such a goody two shoes reputation amongst my peers that the idea of saying something vaguely outrageous was shocking. Suddenly everyone was watching it and I watched as the viewing figures for that first video ticked into three figures. It's nothing compared to what vloggers get today but every single person in my year group at school saw it at some point. I began to realise though that the figures for the other videos were going up too and people started talking to me about the other 'episodes'. I bowed to popular demand and made a second inappropriate joke about my ex and I became 'that guy who makes the videos'.
As much as there was an element of people making fun out of me, on the whole the reaction was positive. I think people were probably surprised by how the quiet teenage Dan had showed a completely different side to himself and was expressing himself in a way that no-one had really seen before. It took over my life and it got to the point where I was turning up to school without doing my homework because I'd been so engrossed in putting the next episode together.
Of course, there was one victim in all of this furore and that was my ex-girlfriend. I never really saw what it was like to be on the other side of things but I can imagine it wasn't very pleasant. The first one I kind of felt OK about- I had been angry at the way the relationship had ended and I'd never really thought anyone would see the video. I knew though that people would see the second joke and I let my lust for fame take over any decency I had. I find it hard now to imagine that I could do something so horrible to someone. Whatever my intentions had been at the start of it all, my actions caused pain and suffering and I will always regret doing that.
I continued to make videos for several years until I finally decided that I ought to take my studies seriously and killed off my online persona with a loud gunshot sound effect. The viewing figures had reduced a little but there were still people who kept asking for me to continue. It all escalated much further than I'd ever thought it would. Whilst no-one really saw the videos outside of my school, I got a taste of celebrity and saw that I would cross boundaries in order to increase that feeling. If I was ten years younger this could have happened in a world where I could have got some seriously high viewing figures and I'm glad that didn't happen. It must be awful to be publicly scrutinized for every little thing you do and I'd hate to be living a life where my main goal was to get as many likes as possible.
I should point out that every last scrap of the vlog has long since been wiped from the internet and there is no way to watch them thank goodness- I did some pretty deep searching before I published this post!
This blog has always been as much for me as it is for anybody else. I do quite like the fact that people are coming back to read my nonsense every week though and I feel it's pushing me to keep going and come up with different ideas. Thanks, as always, for reading.
Don't get me wrong, I'm always happy to be given a compliment. Indeed, in the last week or so I've been complimented on all sorts of things. This is of course lovely but I never know how to respond to a compliment. I mean, obviously I should just say "thank you" yet somehow that rarely ends up happening and I end up just saying "yes". I worry this makes me come across as big-headed as if I think that said compliment is a given, when in actual fact I'm not saying thank you mainly because I'm so baffled by the concept of anyone thinking something that I'm doing is any good. If you are one of the complimenters, I apologise for my awkwardness and am profoundly grateful.
It's not the first time my online life has leaked into my real life.
During my teenage years the internet as we know it today was invented and I was there at the forefront, being the first person I knew to join every social network. Back in the early noughties, in my home town at least, the internet for young teenagers was something only used for homework. I could only find about fifteen friends on Myspace and one of them was Tom from Myspace. Next along was Bebo and that was the social network that made me fall in love with the possibilities of the internet. More people I knew were getting involved and I loved how you could personalise your profile in so many ways to make it uniquely yours.
Then Facebook appeared and suddenly everyone was joining it. I never liked it as much as Bebo but it took off, probably thanks to it's simplicity. Then Twitter turned up and I was the first person I knew to join it and Stephen Fry was the only celebrity using it. It was hugely fun before all the racists and trolls turned up. All the while I had MSN messenger open too and would be having inane conversations with my friends- several people I used to chat with for hours and hours were people I'd only met once or twice in reality.
During all this, I got into vlogging. I find it weird that over a decade on and that's a fairly common word that most people understand. Vloggers make huge amounts of money and become celebrities in their own right. It's become the main way many pre-teens consume media. It's a mile away from where I started when vlogging wasn't even a word.
It all began when I started playing with Windows Movie Maker and I produced a little video introducing myself and various parts of my life. This was before I owned a laptop with a camera and whilst my phone did have a camera it had about four pixels. So I'd basically created a slide show of images with me talking over the top of them. One of these images was a photo of my ex-girlfriend who had only ended the relationship fairly recently. In my narration, which was completely unplanned, I repeated a sexual joke about my ex that someone had said to me and thought nothing much of it at the time.
I continued to make videos and gradually they became at least a little more sophisticated. I produced a low pixel found footage horror film and talked about things I had been up to. Eventually I purchased a USB webcam and my videos became more like the sort of vlogs you might find online today. For the first few months no-one was really watching my videos but they are on my various social media profiles and gradually began to be discovered. The moment that really gained interest amongst my peers was that sexual joke.
I had such a goody two shoes reputation amongst my peers that the idea of saying something vaguely outrageous was shocking. Suddenly everyone was watching it and I watched as the viewing figures for that first video ticked into three figures. It's nothing compared to what vloggers get today but every single person in my year group at school saw it at some point. I began to realise though that the figures for the other videos were going up too and people started talking to me about the other 'episodes'. I bowed to popular demand and made a second inappropriate joke about my ex and I became 'that guy who makes the videos'.
As much as there was an element of people making fun out of me, on the whole the reaction was positive. I think people were probably surprised by how the quiet teenage Dan had showed a completely different side to himself and was expressing himself in a way that no-one had really seen before. It took over my life and it got to the point where I was turning up to school without doing my homework because I'd been so engrossed in putting the next episode together.
Of course, there was one victim in all of this furore and that was my ex-girlfriend. I never really saw what it was like to be on the other side of things but I can imagine it wasn't very pleasant. The first one I kind of felt OK about- I had been angry at the way the relationship had ended and I'd never really thought anyone would see the video. I knew though that people would see the second joke and I let my lust for fame take over any decency I had. I find it hard now to imagine that I could do something so horrible to someone. Whatever my intentions had been at the start of it all, my actions caused pain and suffering and I will always regret doing that.
I continued to make videos for several years until I finally decided that I ought to take my studies seriously and killed off my online persona with a loud gunshot sound effect. The viewing figures had reduced a little but there were still people who kept asking for me to continue. It all escalated much further than I'd ever thought it would. Whilst no-one really saw the videos outside of my school, I got a taste of celebrity and saw that I would cross boundaries in order to increase that feeling. If I was ten years younger this could have happened in a world where I could have got some seriously high viewing figures and I'm glad that didn't happen. It must be awful to be publicly scrutinized for every little thing you do and I'd hate to be living a life where my main goal was to get as many likes as possible.
I should point out that every last scrap of the vlog has long since been wiped from the internet and there is no way to watch them thank goodness- I did some pretty deep searching before I published this post!
This blog has always been as much for me as it is for anybody else. I do quite like the fact that people are coming back to read my nonsense every week though and I feel it's pushing me to keep going and come up with different ideas. Thanks, as always, for reading.
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