My Dérive
I began my cyberflaneur journey with finger-tutting on YouTube; I had heard about the little subculture for some time. At first I thought the recommended tab would reveal more finger-tutting videos so I could dive deeper down the rabbit hole. I’ve actually done something similar to this before, where I’ve continued clicking to the next video for hours into the night. Oftentimes I’d find a trend and watch my fill of it, finding similar videos.
But instead, the next video after the finger-tutting also dealt with sleight of hand, though more related to cards. The video was called “The Art of Cardistry” and showed an impressive montage of skill with professional playing cards. Once again, I thought I would go down the rabbit hole of “cardistry” or sleight of hand in general, but once again I’m distracted. “Chris Pratt knows the best card trick” pops up in the recommended, so I have to watch that. He’s on the Graham Norton Show, which I only occasionally watch to see comedians in action. It was nice to see some more celebrities.
From here, it was interesting to me how one could see my viewing history and connect the dots to see how I had progressed, “cards” now being the through-line. So of course, from there I’m taken to the “Hidden Card” scene from the Now You See Me 2 movie. The through-line switches to movies, however, when I transition over to the “Baby Driver Opening Scene”, then a commentary breakdown of the opening scene, and how well done it is. Then finally, I watch another commentary about how the characters costume design in Baby Driver is color-coded to display and foreshadow the characters and what they mean to the story.
This was only for half an hour, but I took quite the leap from finger-tutting to video essays about Baby Driver. I started with something I had wanted to investigate for some time, and the starting point was the hardest part. From there, I followed the algorithms, though tried to avoid what I normally would immediately click on. Still, I found videos interesting to me, and even subscribed to somebody new who was making the video essays on Baby Driver.
Overall, I thought this experience was definitely worth having. I really felt what I had been missing when I went from not being signed in to YouTube to having all my recommended show what I usually watched. It really was night and day how different and exploratory my experience on the Internet could be if I weren’t constantly clicking on the same videos the algorithm knew I usually watched. I think it’s definitely liberating in a sense to not really have a goal past finding things amusing or entertaining on the Internet. It’s also great to be off the radar in a sense, where there isn’t a watchful YouTube that thinks it already know what kind of person you are, and what you’re going to click on next.
