One of the reasons the most outrageously bland, plasticine audio-visual goyslop online is getting even more views now than it was 10-15 years ago is that the internet is a far larger more international place than it was back then. Whereas before, internet usage was largely concentrated in the First World and Eastern Europe, now it's easier to list the places where it isn't readily available. India alone, with its nominal 139 million or so English speakers, added a whole new Japan-sized group of rubes to swindle with subpar content. The English internet in particular is much larger than it used to be - the Russian, Korean, and Japanese internets which were (and still are) largely isolated made up a much larger proportion of total users.
I feel like the whole youtube category of Black People Reacting to White People Things, which itself is an outgrowth of the larger genre of Black People Interacting With White People Things, is probably just the modern incarnation of the minstrel show.
Honestly, I never really thought about it that way before, but it makes sense. India doesn't just add more rubes to swindle, but more swindlers, which explains the absolutely meteoric rise of YouTube content farms, brainrot clickbait, AI-generated slop, so on and so forth. The old Indian plague of touts, scammers, and swindlers that make visiting the country a total fucking nightmare (look up Karl Rock on YouTube, the guy has hundreds of videos on the subject) now jump off the streets of Calcutta and right onto our home pages!
Okay, a bit dramatic perhaps, but my sisters were of the age to get sucked into the Bakeryverse shows when they were airing. I don't believe they ever got fully hooked by Drake and Josh, but I do recall it being on in the house at that time, same with Zoey 101, which I recall my youngest sister enjoying quite a bit.
I didn't care for any of these shows myself, which was the case for most sitcoms at the time. I watched some of the mid-to-late 90's ones from Disney when we lived in the mountains, your Even Stevens and the like, but by the time we moved back down from that little tourist town into the city again I was well into high school and firmly finished with that type of kid's programming. Some sitcoms still found their way into my life - I enjoyed watching King of Queens and Everybody Loves Raymond with my parents at the time, though nowadays I find them considerably less funny, and King of the Hill was and still remains the GOAT - but by and large, I just wasn't interested in them. The crude humor of South Park and Cartoon Network's Adult Swim block was much more my speed by that point.
As such, I'm sure you can imagine why I found great dislike of iCarly when it started infesting our home with its noise. I enjoyed my fair share of the LOLSORANDOM humor common to early YT, as many of my friends did, but it was relegated strictly to the wide open expanse that was the internet of that age, where people could often get away with being as wild and weird as they wanted. As such, iCarly was the worst of two worlds for me - an unfunny Nickelodeon kids sitcom on one hand, and a bunch of kids internet content on the other that was hamstrung by the limitations of what's allowed on cable TV. In a certain way, you could almost look at it as a precursor to the sanitized space YT has tried to turn itself into over the last decade or so.
Of course, at the time I didn't know anything about ol' Dirty Dan and his strange manias...
I understand your pain - having younger sisters myself, I was, at times, at their mercy when it came to what was on the playroom television, and many times I was subjected to audio-visual torture of those CGI Barbie movies. It's also the only reason I ever saw any of Zoey 101. I do remember Even Stevens, and liking it well enough, but I also bore a striking resemblance to Shia LeBeouf before I grew facial hair so I got really tired of people calling me "Shia" in middle school (though, by that time, he was doing the Transformers movies, I believe).
Very astute observation about these Nick sitcoms and current day YT. The random humor never gets too random because of the rating standards imposed by cable television, and most YT content feels just as watered down and neutered. It's amazing that even in content made for and by adults, creators are so shit scared of being demonetized by the mighty wrath of "le algorithm" they'll say "unalive" or other TikTok-isms that took off on that platform as away of getting around the oh-so controversial word "suicide". You can't even type that word into most platform without being redirected to a crisis hotline. Absolutely ridiculous.
What's funny is the next show on Dan's docket is actually much more... well, let's say daring in the content. I think he was getting tired of pandering to children alone and decided to push the boundaries of what kind of jokes he could get away with making. It's an interesting development and I have to wonder if it's any coincidence it happened around the same time he was getting more... brazen, shall we say, on social media.
There's an element of grim interest in seeing how this story developed over that time, particularly from the social media end. I've never been a big user of social media generally speaking. I found Twitter stupid and pointless from the outset and really never got involved with it beyond automated notification posts back when I used to run my own YT channel; Facebook was a temporary stopover many, many years after Myspace died and by the end I mainly use that to unsuccessfully shill my webcomic to friends and family; (I've joked before that if I had a nickel for every time someone in my "warm" market told me, "Oh yeah I gotta remember to read your stuff!" that I'd already be a pretty wealthy man.) Instagram only exists as a way for me to follow my artistically inclined friends and shill my work here; and when I used Minds it was purely for the sake of the YT channel and helping to advertise some of my other creative friends.
Point is, I didn't get too wrapped up in the messy world of social media, so the vast majority of this stuff flew right under my radar at the time. But like we've talked about with Vivzie and Spoony and all those other instances of people falling prey to the comfortable discomfort of Twitter and the like, I have a feeling none of it is going to end up surprising me.
Twitter, to be fair, is stupid and pointless, which is also why - thermonuclear take incoming - Notes was a net negative for Substack in the long run, since it's just enabled similar behavior (and yes, I still use it every now and then, but it seems like some people only come here to use Notes, which kind of defeats the purpose of... everything). Though it isn't as egregiously awful as Twitter, I think that's only because the user base is both smaller and... well, I really don't want to give the masses too much credit and say it's because the average substack user is a whole standard deviation above the mean IQ of Twitter's userbase, but it's probably true. Ultimately, the userbase here and Twitter's base are two completely different species. Though, the more they court Twitter-like features, the worse I fear it will get.
This is all to say that the moment I see someone acting like Schneider in the Notes feature, I know this site is cooked.
King of Queens and Raymond, now those are some shows I haven't thought about in years and years. Another thing I remember sometimes being on when I was channel-surfing, but I always found them bland and boring with a lot of forced humor personally. My main reference for KoQ is that the lady who played the guy's wife (?) in it was the voice actress for Gabriel Knight's Grace Nakamura right before that show made her famous, which probably tells you all you need to know about my reference frame, haha. GK is such a gem of the point and click age, and it's kind of sad it's always overshadowed by the LucasArts stuff, but that's another story.
King of the Hill looks like an interesting show, but I only found about it years later from internet memes. Maybe it's worth the effort of tracking down sometime.
And considering both of your experiences here, maybe I should be happy I'm an only child...(I certainly never did miss having siblings as a kid)
I give grief about my sisters primarily in jest. My youngest two I get along with fabulously, it's the two middle kids - the sister who's two months younger than me and my younger brother - who were the massive problem children. The stories related to them are the ones that will make you feel genuinely thankful to be an only child.
The humor in KoQ and Raymond was definitely a bit forced. My main reason for watching both was mostly as a way to spend a little passive time cracking jokes alongside the show with my parents, which was some good fun. I will also admit to having liked Kevin James's comedy at the time, though obviously his stand-up was much better than his sitcom work. Raymond I mainly watched for his parents and his brother, because I have a soft spot for Brad Garrett. Recently my wife and I tried watching both shows again. She was able to get some nostalgic joy out of it, I wasn't. The forced nature of the comedy came in far too strong and I gave up after one episode of each.
King of the Hill is still a staple rewatch for us, though. It's still very grounded, but there's a little bit of extra zaniness worked into it that you can't get in live action sitcoms that are restricted by sets and settings. It's not hard to find, either. I think Hulu and Amazon Prime both have it available (though you'd have to purchase the seasons on Prime I'm sure) and there's absolutely other sources you can track down the episodes through.
I can’t describe how much I hate the mid-oughts “that’s so random!” style of humor. I was the exact age demographic targeted by these shows, only I was a relatively sheltered kid with no cable. But the kids at school were all catechized by this Nickelodeon slop. And (God help me) I pretended I knew what it was all about and tried to adopt it as my personality too. It was the only way to get attention from girls in 4-7th grade, before puberty made athleticism a real option as a draw.
If we're of the same generation, as it sounds like we were, it was pretty much unavoidable - at one point or another, most of us thought the peak of comedy was saying "I like Tacos" or "Waffles!". I just give thanks to God that he gave me the strength and wits to grow beyond that because I still see people my age who somehow, some way, stubbornly resisted all urges to develop past that particular stage in their life. Mostly former scene/emo kids who got into drugs. I almost feel bad for being this harsh, but at the same time, there really is no other word than "sad" to describe a thirty-five year old woman still dressing in 2005-era MySpace scene fashion - Invader Zim apparel and all.
You're right that it took some savvy to identify this particular niche and seize on it right at the moment when it was possible due to the rise of Youtube, but before Twitch et al made it boring and mundane. Still, I find myself curious about what the experience would have been like for those lucky few selected to appear on the show. Of course I don't think preteens would literally believe the show was real, but as you've shown here, Schneider and co. went to some length to maintain the illusion. Suddenly being face to face with the actual realities of producing a television show and seeing the characters as their actors on a regular workday must have been a pretty brutal shattering of that illusion...or maybe I'm just overthinking it.
As for the rise of Youtube, all I can say is that I'm so, so happy YT and Twitch weren't around when I was a child. Both in terms of not leaving some piece of fossilized idiocy to linger in the deep strata, which me and my friends might well have done, and in terms of not growing up on a diet of cultural garbage. Like I said in an earlier comment, it still probably wasn't the healthiest upbringing compared to earlier generations, but at least we had stuff like Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger and Baldur's Gate. (Or, say, Talespin, The Pirates of Dark Water and the Adventures of Pete if you want to keep it to televised children's faire)
I doubt I'll ever be a parent, but I have no idea how people with a Luddite bent manage to shield their kids from this torrent of questionable media. Even if you try to restrict it, they'll find a way around it via friends or other means, and of course you're also presenting a big, juicy target to rebel against. The firmer the stance, the more tempting the rebellion...not to mention the insane peer pressure.
One quibble: personal computers were "beginning to become a fixture" in people's homes in 2006? In that case, America must have been extremely slow to adopt them compared to my country. That sentence would have made more sense for me if you'd been talking about 1996. By 2006 we're just a few short years out from the smartphone era, after all. In my case we got our first home PC in 1992.
Anyway, appreciate the good work as always, and looking forward to the next installment.
I actually found some reports on Reddit of one or two people who were invited on the show, and they said everything was fine. They never noticed anything was off and the staff was all polite and professional, though the experience was still stressful because Schneider ran his set like a factory assembly line, so there was a lot of running around and meeting strict schedules. I assume having outsiders, let alone members of the audience, whipped a certain someone into being on his best behavior.
As for how people keep their kids from getting sucked into the maelstrom of shit that is questionable YouTube content, the only people I've seen that have had success just don't let their kids have access to tablets, phones, and computers and, if they do, they are extremely thorough in vetting what's available to them (most of them disable wi-fi access and just have some games or pre-selected episodes of, like, Bluey or something). Others take a more cavalier approach and let their kids do whatever but step in when it becomes a problem. I have a friend who's son got really, REALLY into Minecraft Let's Plays and streams (which, if you know anything about the veritable circus of degenerate freaks in that space, you know is not a good thing), and he just blocked YouTube and Twitch on the family computer and told his son, "If you want to play Minecraft, fine, but you're going to play it, not watch some loser manchild play it on YouTube". These approaches seem to work well enough. Ultimately I think there is no guaranteed way to keep your kids safe from it, you just have to hope that you raise them well enough to be able to possess the strength, will-power, and intelligence not to get sucked into it. Or, like me, maybe they do, but they find a way out before it becomes terminal. It's a difficult line that can only be tread delicately, but coming on too heavy-handed can result in the exact opposite since, yes, the temptation to rebel will inevitably push them over the line. That's why I think the "exposure" route is probably the safest. It's like alcohol, in a way; you can try to hide the reality of it from your children and ensure that they know nothing about how dangerous it can be, or you can expose them to it so that when they inevitably try it, they are at least aware of what it can do.
As for the bit about computers, it may be a bit of an overstatement but it also isn't untrue. Maybe it wasn't computers that became a fixture of the household so much as the internet. I'm not sure what the roll-out of the internet looked like in the UK (you're British, right? I feel like you brought that up before), but here, most places that had internet access didn't have good access or connection at the time. Bandwidth was limited and dial-up was pretty much ubiquitous, which meant that what you could access, how fast you could access it, and even when you could access it was extremely limited. This began to change around 2005/2006, but just by virtue of being such a large, expansive country with a lot of inhospitable terrain and large stretches of nothing between oases of civilization, it took a lot longer for certain parts of the country to get internet connections that weren't dial-up. Even today, there are a lot of places that still have pretty limited options when it comes to internet. In a lot of places in rural Texas, maybe an hour and a half's drive outside of Houston or Dallas and even less for a smaller, more isolated city like Lubbock or Midland, there's, like, maybe one company you can get internet from, and it's something of a state-wide meme that if you don't live in a major city or a suburb, you have to use that one company. And it sucks. Infamously so. But, its also the only game in town. Obviously, that's changing, and fast, but around 2005 and 2006 high-speed internet was only just becoming an option for a not insignificant portion of the population. So, I guess what I should say is that even if a family had a computer in their house, it wasn't always connected to the internet, or had a very shitty connection. For a lot of kids in my generation, the computer was usually just a machine that their dad did work on or a glorified game console. My dad was always big into computers so we always had one in the house, but I remember when we lived in rural North-East Texas we didn't have an internet connection.
Oh, I didn't mean to imply anything dodgy on Schneider's part with those visits. More that it's such a peek behind the curtain, to put it that way. And like you're saying, even on a good day I'm sure making TV is a hectic and strange experience.
I suspect you're right re. YT and exposure. Again, otherwise you're just presenting something to rebel against. The problem around here is that you can't really keep your kids from getting iPads, since public schools will literally give one to every student from the early grades, and most of what they do in schools seems to be digital these days. Thankfully there's been a bit of a pushback against this lately, so maybe it'll change, but it irritates me how they're essentially taking away parents' right to choose how to raise their kids. I suppose you could confiscate the thing at home, but still.
As for "here", you're probably getting me mixing up with someone else, since I'm Norwegian, not British. I'm flattered you think my English is good enough to pass for native, though. :) I tend to be a little hesitant in announcing that due to all the "I am from Norway" memes and the way we can seemingly never shut up about our country, haha.
(And makes sense with the PC vs internet connection thing, think it was about the same here, with dial-up getting phased out around the turn of the millennium)
Don't even get me started on taking away parents right to raise their children. That's, like, a third rail to me. I'm not even a parent but I live in a state where the state is increasingly eating away at parental rights and, in some cases, they can unilaterally take a child from the home if the parent is accused of a laundry-list of various offenses (that's rapidly growing) by any number of third parties, most prominently teachers. I suspect that in a few years it will get to the point where a parent could tell a child "No, you can't have candy for breakfast", and if the kid tells their teacher, said child will be taken from the home. Needless to say, if and when I do have kids, I will probably move.
Also... your English is better than most native speakers I know and regularly see online, so I would have never guessed. I don't know much about Norway outside of the usual racial stereotypes, but I can imagine that, given the country is (I believe) quite large but with the population concentrated in the south, the internet roll-out went a lot faster and more ubiquitous than it was in America.
"I had to scrape through more tabloids and internet gutters filled with celebrity gossip to do this research, and, frankly, I’m done with it, so I’m gonna keep this brief. "
That's really saying something, considering the cesspools I figure you must have had to wade through for some of your other pieces.
"Stephen Molaro, who’s the aforementioned dumb fuck we all have to thank for inflicting this audio-visual toxic waste upon the collective consciousness of America"
"And, much like cable television, there’s apparently an audience for it that eats this shit up, because some of these reaction channels still get millions of views. Because there is no justice in the world."
Seems like you were saying something about a Butlerian Jihad, a while back.
One of the reasons the most outrageously bland, plasticine audio-visual goyslop online is getting even more views now than it was 10-15 years ago is that the internet is a far larger more international place than it was back then. Whereas before, internet usage was largely concentrated in the First World and Eastern Europe, now it's easier to list the places where it isn't readily available. India alone, with its nominal 139 million or so English speakers, added a whole new Japan-sized group of rubes to swindle with subpar content. The English internet in particular is much larger than it used to be - the Russian, Korean, and Japanese internets which were (and still are) largely isolated made up a much larger proportion of total users.
I feel like the whole youtube category of Black People Reacting to White People Things, which itself is an outgrowth of the larger genre of Black People Interacting With White People Things, is probably just the modern incarnation of the minstrel show.
Honestly, I never really thought about it that way before, but it makes sense. India doesn't just add more rubes to swindle, but more swindlers, which explains the absolutely meteoric rise of YouTube content farms, brainrot clickbait, AI-generated slop, so on and so forth. The old Indian plague of touts, scammers, and swindlers that make visiting the country a total fucking nightmare (look up Karl Rock on YouTube, the guy has hundreds of videos on the subject) now jump off the streets of Calcutta and right onto our home pages!
Lovely.
Ah, yes. iCarly, my old enemy.
Okay, a bit dramatic perhaps, but my sisters were of the age to get sucked into the Bakeryverse shows when they were airing. I don't believe they ever got fully hooked by Drake and Josh, but I do recall it being on in the house at that time, same with Zoey 101, which I recall my youngest sister enjoying quite a bit.
I didn't care for any of these shows myself, which was the case for most sitcoms at the time. I watched some of the mid-to-late 90's ones from Disney when we lived in the mountains, your Even Stevens and the like, but by the time we moved back down from that little tourist town into the city again I was well into high school and firmly finished with that type of kid's programming. Some sitcoms still found their way into my life - I enjoyed watching King of Queens and Everybody Loves Raymond with my parents at the time, though nowadays I find them considerably less funny, and King of the Hill was and still remains the GOAT - but by and large, I just wasn't interested in them. The crude humor of South Park and Cartoon Network's Adult Swim block was much more my speed by that point.
As such, I'm sure you can imagine why I found great dislike of iCarly when it started infesting our home with its noise. I enjoyed my fair share of the LOLSORANDOM humor common to early YT, as many of my friends did, but it was relegated strictly to the wide open expanse that was the internet of that age, where people could often get away with being as wild and weird as they wanted. As such, iCarly was the worst of two worlds for me - an unfunny Nickelodeon kids sitcom on one hand, and a bunch of kids internet content on the other that was hamstrung by the limitations of what's allowed on cable TV. In a certain way, you could almost look at it as a precursor to the sanitized space YT has tried to turn itself into over the last decade or so.
Of course, at the time I didn't know anything about ol' Dirty Dan and his strange manias...
I understand your pain - having younger sisters myself, I was, at times, at their mercy when it came to what was on the playroom television, and many times I was subjected to audio-visual torture of those CGI Barbie movies. It's also the only reason I ever saw any of Zoey 101. I do remember Even Stevens, and liking it well enough, but I also bore a striking resemblance to Shia LeBeouf before I grew facial hair so I got really tired of people calling me "Shia" in middle school (though, by that time, he was doing the Transformers movies, I believe).
Very astute observation about these Nick sitcoms and current day YT. The random humor never gets too random because of the rating standards imposed by cable television, and most YT content feels just as watered down and neutered. It's amazing that even in content made for and by adults, creators are so shit scared of being demonetized by the mighty wrath of "le algorithm" they'll say "unalive" or other TikTok-isms that took off on that platform as away of getting around the oh-so controversial word "suicide". You can't even type that word into most platform without being redirected to a crisis hotline. Absolutely ridiculous.
What's funny is the next show on Dan's docket is actually much more... well, let's say daring in the content. I think he was getting tired of pandering to children alone and decided to push the boundaries of what kind of jokes he could get away with making. It's an interesting development and I have to wonder if it's any coincidence it happened around the same time he was getting more... brazen, shall we say, on social media.
There's an element of grim interest in seeing how this story developed over that time, particularly from the social media end. I've never been a big user of social media generally speaking. I found Twitter stupid and pointless from the outset and really never got involved with it beyond automated notification posts back when I used to run my own YT channel; Facebook was a temporary stopover many, many years after Myspace died and by the end I mainly use that to unsuccessfully shill my webcomic to friends and family; (I've joked before that if I had a nickel for every time someone in my "warm" market told me, "Oh yeah I gotta remember to read your stuff!" that I'd already be a pretty wealthy man.) Instagram only exists as a way for me to follow my artistically inclined friends and shill my work here; and when I used Minds it was purely for the sake of the YT channel and helping to advertise some of my other creative friends.
Point is, I didn't get too wrapped up in the messy world of social media, so the vast majority of this stuff flew right under my radar at the time. But like we've talked about with Vivzie and Spoony and all those other instances of people falling prey to the comfortable discomfort of Twitter and the like, I have a feeling none of it is going to end up surprising me.
Twitter, to be fair, is stupid and pointless, which is also why - thermonuclear take incoming - Notes was a net negative for Substack in the long run, since it's just enabled similar behavior (and yes, I still use it every now and then, but it seems like some people only come here to use Notes, which kind of defeats the purpose of... everything). Though it isn't as egregiously awful as Twitter, I think that's only because the user base is both smaller and... well, I really don't want to give the masses too much credit and say it's because the average substack user is a whole standard deviation above the mean IQ of Twitter's userbase, but it's probably true. Ultimately, the userbase here and Twitter's base are two completely different species. Though, the more they court Twitter-like features, the worse I fear it will get.
This is all to say that the moment I see someone acting like Schneider in the Notes feature, I know this site is cooked.
King of Queens and Raymond, now those are some shows I haven't thought about in years and years. Another thing I remember sometimes being on when I was channel-surfing, but I always found them bland and boring with a lot of forced humor personally. My main reference for KoQ is that the lady who played the guy's wife (?) in it was the voice actress for Gabriel Knight's Grace Nakamura right before that show made her famous, which probably tells you all you need to know about my reference frame, haha. GK is such a gem of the point and click age, and it's kind of sad it's always overshadowed by the LucasArts stuff, but that's another story.
King of the Hill looks like an interesting show, but I only found about it years later from internet memes. Maybe it's worth the effort of tracking down sometime.
And considering both of your experiences here, maybe I should be happy I'm an only child...(I certainly never did miss having siblings as a kid)
I give grief about my sisters primarily in jest. My youngest two I get along with fabulously, it's the two middle kids - the sister who's two months younger than me and my younger brother - who were the massive problem children. The stories related to them are the ones that will make you feel genuinely thankful to be an only child.
The humor in KoQ and Raymond was definitely a bit forced. My main reason for watching both was mostly as a way to spend a little passive time cracking jokes alongside the show with my parents, which was some good fun. I will also admit to having liked Kevin James's comedy at the time, though obviously his stand-up was much better than his sitcom work. Raymond I mainly watched for his parents and his brother, because I have a soft spot for Brad Garrett. Recently my wife and I tried watching both shows again. She was able to get some nostalgic joy out of it, I wasn't. The forced nature of the comedy came in far too strong and I gave up after one episode of each.
King of the Hill is still a staple rewatch for us, though. It's still very grounded, but there's a little bit of extra zaniness worked into it that you can't get in live action sitcoms that are restricted by sets and settings. It's not hard to find, either. I think Hulu and Amazon Prime both have it available (though you'd have to purchase the seasons on Prime I'm sure) and there's absolutely other sources you can track down the episodes through.
I can’t describe how much I hate the mid-oughts “that’s so random!” style of humor. I was the exact age demographic targeted by these shows, only I was a relatively sheltered kid with no cable. But the kids at school were all catechized by this Nickelodeon slop. And (God help me) I pretended I knew what it was all about and tried to adopt it as my personality too. It was the only way to get attention from girls in 4-7th grade, before puberty made athleticism a real option as a draw.
If we're of the same generation, as it sounds like we were, it was pretty much unavoidable - at one point or another, most of us thought the peak of comedy was saying "I like Tacos" or "Waffles!". I just give thanks to God that he gave me the strength and wits to grow beyond that because I still see people my age who somehow, some way, stubbornly resisted all urges to develop past that particular stage in their life. Mostly former scene/emo kids who got into drugs. I almost feel bad for being this harsh, but at the same time, there really is no other word than "sad" to describe a thirty-five year old woman still dressing in 2005-era MySpace scene fashion - Invader Zim apparel and all.
You're right that it took some savvy to identify this particular niche and seize on it right at the moment when it was possible due to the rise of Youtube, but before Twitch et al made it boring and mundane. Still, I find myself curious about what the experience would have been like for those lucky few selected to appear on the show. Of course I don't think preteens would literally believe the show was real, but as you've shown here, Schneider and co. went to some length to maintain the illusion. Suddenly being face to face with the actual realities of producing a television show and seeing the characters as their actors on a regular workday must have been a pretty brutal shattering of that illusion...or maybe I'm just overthinking it.
As for the rise of Youtube, all I can say is that I'm so, so happy YT and Twitch weren't around when I was a child. Both in terms of not leaving some piece of fossilized idiocy to linger in the deep strata, which me and my friends might well have done, and in terms of not growing up on a diet of cultural garbage. Like I said in an earlier comment, it still probably wasn't the healthiest upbringing compared to earlier generations, but at least we had stuff like Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger and Baldur's Gate. (Or, say, Talespin, The Pirates of Dark Water and the Adventures of Pete if you want to keep it to televised children's faire)
I doubt I'll ever be a parent, but I have no idea how people with a Luddite bent manage to shield their kids from this torrent of questionable media. Even if you try to restrict it, they'll find a way around it via friends or other means, and of course you're also presenting a big, juicy target to rebel against. The firmer the stance, the more tempting the rebellion...not to mention the insane peer pressure.
One quibble: personal computers were "beginning to become a fixture" in people's homes in 2006? In that case, America must have been extremely slow to adopt them compared to my country. That sentence would have made more sense for me if you'd been talking about 1996. By 2006 we're just a few short years out from the smartphone era, after all. In my case we got our first home PC in 1992.
Anyway, appreciate the good work as always, and looking forward to the next installment.
I actually found some reports on Reddit of one or two people who were invited on the show, and they said everything was fine. They never noticed anything was off and the staff was all polite and professional, though the experience was still stressful because Schneider ran his set like a factory assembly line, so there was a lot of running around and meeting strict schedules. I assume having outsiders, let alone members of the audience, whipped a certain someone into being on his best behavior.
As for how people keep their kids from getting sucked into the maelstrom of shit that is questionable YouTube content, the only people I've seen that have had success just don't let their kids have access to tablets, phones, and computers and, if they do, they are extremely thorough in vetting what's available to them (most of them disable wi-fi access and just have some games or pre-selected episodes of, like, Bluey or something). Others take a more cavalier approach and let their kids do whatever but step in when it becomes a problem. I have a friend who's son got really, REALLY into Minecraft Let's Plays and streams (which, if you know anything about the veritable circus of degenerate freaks in that space, you know is not a good thing), and he just blocked YouTube and Twitch on the family computer and told his son, "If you want to play Minecraft, fine, but you're going to play it, not watch some loser manchild play it on YouTube". These approaches seem to work well enough. Ultimately I think there is no guaranteed way to keep your kids safe from it, you just have to hope that you raise them well enough to be able to possess the strength, will-power, and intelligence not to get sucked into it. Or, like me, maybe they do, but they find a way out before it becomes terminal. It's a difficult line that can only be tread delicately, but coming on too heavy-handed can result in the exact opposite since, yes, the temptation to rebel will inevitably push them over the line. That's why I think the "exposure" route is probably the safest. It's like alcohol, in a way; you can try to hide the reality of it from your children and ensure that they know nothing about how dangerous it can be, or you can expose them to it so that when they inevitably try it, they are at least aware of what it can do.
As for the bit about computers, it may be a bit of an overstatement but it also isn't untrue. Maybe it wasn't computers that became a fixture of the household so much as the internet. I'm not sure what the roll-out of the internet looked like in the UK (you're British, right? I feel like you brought that up before), but here, most places that had internet access didn't have good access or connection at the time. Bandwidth was limited and dial-up was pretty much ubiquitous, which meant that what you could access, how fast you could access it, and even when you could access it was extremely limited. This began to change around 2005/2006, but just by virtue of being such a large, expansive country with a lot of inhospitable terrain and large stretches of nothing between oases of civilization, it took a lot longer for certain parts of the country to get internet connections that weren't dial-up. Even today, there are a lot of places that still have pretty limited options when it comes to internet. In a lot of places in rural Texas, maybe an hour and a half's drive outside of Houston or Dallas and even less for a smaller, more isolated city like Lubbock or Midland, there's, like, maybe one company you can get internet from, and it's something of a state-wide meme that if you don't live in a major city or a suburb, you have to use that one company. And it sucks. Infamously so. But, its also the only game in town. Obviously, that's changing, and fast, but around 2005 and 2006 high-speed internet was only just becoming an option for a not insignificant portion of the population. So, I guess what I should say is that even if a family had a computer in their house, it wasn't always connected to the internet, or had a very shitty connection. For a lot of kids in my generation, the computer was usually just a machine that their dad did work on or a glorified game console. My dad was always big into computers so we always had one in the house, but I remember when we lived in rural North-East Texas we didn't have an internet connection.
Oh, I didn't mean to imply anything dodgy on Schneider's part with those visits. More that it's such a peek behind the curtain, to put it that way. And like you're saying, even on a good day I'm sure making TV is a hectic and strange experience.
I suspect you're right re. YT and exposure. Again, otherwise you're just presenting something to rebel against. The problem around here is that you can't really keep your kids from getting iPads, since public schools will literally give one to every student from the early grades, and most of what they do in schools seems to be digital these days. Thankfully there's been a bit of a pushback against this lately, so maybe it'll change, but it irritates me how they're essentially taking away parents' right to choose how to raise their kids. I suppose you could confiscate the thing at home, but still.
As for "here", you're probably getting me mixing up with someone else, since I'm Norwegian, not British. I'm flattered you think my English is good enough to pass for native, though. :) I tend to be a little hesitant in announcing that due to all the "I am from Norway" memes and the way we can seemingly never shut up about our country, haha.
(And makes sense with the PC vs internet connection thing, think it was about the same here, with dial-up getting phased out around the turn of the millennium)
Don't even get me started on taking away parents right to raise their children. That's, like, a third rail to me. I'm not even a parent but I live in a state where the state is increasingly eating away at parental rights and, in some cases, they can unilaterally take a child from the home if the parent is accused of a laundry-list of various offenses (that's rapidly growing) by any number of third parties, most prominently teachers. I suspect that in a few years it will get to the point where a parent could tell a child "No, you can't have candy for breakfast", and if the kid tells their teacher, said child will be taken from the home. Needless to say, if and when I do have kids, I will probably move.
Also... your English is better than most native speakers I know and regularly see online, so I would have never guessed. I don't know much about Norway outside of the usual racial stereotypes, but I can imagine that, given the country is (I believe) quite large but with the population concentrated in the south, the internet roll-out went a lot faster and more ubiquitous than it was in America.
What a cliffhanger! Very good article and I will be looking forward to what’s next!
Thanks as always Jenn, I appreciate the support :)
"I had to scrape through more tabloids and internet gutters filled with celebrity gossip to do this research, and, frankly, I’m done with it, so I’m gonna keep this brief. "
That's really saying something, considering the cesspools I figure you must have had to wade through for some of your other pieces.
"Stephen Molaro, who’s the aforementioned dumb fuck we all have to thank for inflicting this audio-visual toxic waste upon the collective consciousness of America"
"And, much like cable television, there’s apparently an audience for it that eats this shit up, because some of these reaction channels still get millions of views. Because there is no justice in the world."
Seems like you were saying something about a Butlerian Jihad, a while back.