From Annabelle to Blockbuster
And the weird, crazy path through YouTube to get there.
I started my 30 minute dérive through the Internet on YouTube with a video I had already added to my Watch Later list, wanting to see how far off-topic I could get using just the Recommended Videos in the right sidebar.
My starting point: The Real Story Behind the Haunted Annabelle Doll by the Buzzfeed Unsolved Network. This was familiar territory, so after deciding to only watch the first 1–2 minutes of every video due to time constraints, I picked something that looked interesting and followed these rules:
- it was not created by the same channel as the video I was currently watching
- it was Recommended based on the current video’s content, not my usual viewing history (videos that are “Recommended for you”)
Slightly off topic but still well within the category of spooky mysteries, I switched over to Cicada 3301: An Internet Mystery. Any video I came across that I wanted to watch more of I added to my Watch Later list and moved on, on the hunt for new sites.
The Mouse Utopia Experiments by Down the Rabbit Hole (ironic name given my quest), still seemed too close in theme to the original video, so I chose from there to watch 4 Disturbing Ads from the 90s. As I suspected, this led to more pop culture-related videos or ones based in nostalgia, the video acting as a bridge to other venues of content.
What Ever Happened to Ronald McDonald? (And the Bizarre Rules for Those Playing the Character) was created by a channel called Today I Found Out — a channel which is apparently a vast empire of knowledge and related videos that is difficult to climb out of. After several failed attempts leading to dead ends (i.e. no other recommended videos besides those created by Today I Found Out), I eventually stumbled across Mario Cart Wii: The History of the Ultra Shortcut, content I definitely would not have come across by direct choice but nonetheless interesting. I added it to my Watch Later playlist and moved on. The final video (after which I noticed my 30 minutes had ended) was What the Last Blockbuster Has that Netflix Doesn’t. The answer, by the way, is the ability to simply wander the aisles, browse random movies, and stumble across content you normally wouldn’t have if searching with the more direct Internet. Appropriately relevant.
I don’t think that it is impossible to be a digital flâneur, but I do see how leaving a website can be difficult, and how social websites take your viewing history to build a bubble of preferred videos around you — normally not a problem except when you want to deliberately go out and find something new and random.
What I learned from my little journey is that YouTube is vast, weird, and surprisingly difficult to escape from, and thanks to recommended content it is also difficult to escape past viewing history or certain channels that have made a lot of content. I also discovered subjects that I would never have found otherwise. It was like wandering through the woods on an intriguing hike… except with more haunted dolls and clowns.
