Due to sickness, my screen time has increased massively in the past few weeks. I have been watching a lot of videos on YouTube, which is probably my favourite platform now. I stumbled upon a channel of a traveller who had been hitchhiking through China, which caught my interest. In his last China video, he decided to go to a forbidden section of the Great Wall and eventually camped there to film magnificent footage of the landscape in the morning. While the views were astonishing, I couldn’t help but wonder if this video is part of a larger harmful trend. Even though there was a disclaimer at the beginning of the video, isn’t this behaviour strongly encouraged in the rest of the video?
YouTube’s daredevils
Compared to the example mentioned above, certain trends are way more dangerous and cause more outrage. In 2016, A Dutch YouTuber named Willem Vink uploaded a video of him and his friend train surfing. In this video, he jumped on a train and rode it for 1 stop. The video caused a lot of controversy and the public transportation company decided to report him to the police.
Another recent popular phenomenon is called buildering, the act of climbing onto tall buildings and skyscrapers. All over social media, daredevils post their climbing adventures as the content is almost a guarantee for views. These videos lead to a lot of outrage as incidents occur sporadically. Last week, British influencer Lewis Stevenson died after trying to climb a tall bridge in Spain. Furthermore, climbers can also destroy properties. In February, content creator Maison Des Champs caused more than 100,000 US dollars in damage while climbing a building in Las Vegas.
Forming daredevil culture
Given the popularity of social media among teenagers, Youtubers can easily affect younger generations. Videos of YouTubers breaking the law are generally very attractive to rebelling teenagers (like myself at the time). Teenagers might also be less aware of the risks involved in these activities (again, myself included). These videos mark a grey area in the YouTube guidelines, as “dangerous and harmful content” is prohibited, a term hard to define. Videos involving a lot of risk are a gateway to views and fame, seeing other creators succeed might inspire smaller YouTubers to create similar content. From this point of view, putting yourself in danger is rewarded and even reinforced.
Should we always be perfect citizens?
This type of content is demanded for a reason: we enjoy the adrenaline rush of breaking the rules. To require YouTube to look into every single video where a law is broken would be practically impossible, and it would surely make social media a whole less exciting. After all, it is our form of entertainment. However, when people are committing acts that are so incredibly dangerous that they could die with one wrong move, we should scratch our heads and wonder if this is the social media sphere we want to uphold. The line between entertaining and harmful is very thin, and sometimes the two even merge. Perhaps, we should personally reinvent the meaning of ‘entertaining’, and therefore wonder if the videos displayed in this blog post are even worthy of obtaining that one extra view.
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