Headline, May 02 2022/ ''' '' YOU TUBE YON '' '''

''' '' YOU TUBE YON '' '''

 

VIRTUAL LOOK AT A YOUTUBE '' NATURAL STATE ''................ VIDEOS offer the fantasy of life on a blank slate that's inaccessible to most of us.

HIS CHANNEL - PRIMITIVE TECHNOLOGY, began in 2015 with a video that has more than 30 million views. It is a showcase for Plant's hobby; building primitive tools and then using those primitive tools to build increasingly sophisticated tools, structures, and weapons.

Posting videos of his projects made him a star in a growing subgenre of people pretending to live like cave dwellers and building things out of raw materials with their bare hands. From January 2017 to August 2018, monthly views for primitive technology, survival and bushcraft videos on YouTube increased by 248 percent.

Even in the past two years of inactivity, Plant's channel passed 10.3 million subscribers and one billion views.

EARLY IN MARCH - A MAN UPLOADED A VIDEO TO HIS YouTube channel. In it, he is seen emerging shirtless from a small, thatched hut, carrying a rudimentary stone hatchet.

He walks, silently and purposefully, to a copse of narrow trees. He chops one down and carried it back to the clearing. He repeats this action until he has assembled a pile of timber. We watch as he demolishes his old, thatched workshop and builds a new one, twice the size.

The man does not explain what he is doing as he frames the structure or as he thatches the roof with palm fronds and vines' in fact, he doesn't talk at all. If you turn on the closed captioning, you can see descriptions of his actions, but only very general ones : ''lashing rafters,'' ''putting rafters in place,'' etc.

There's no music. There's no extradiegetic sound at all - just the forest's chirping melodies and the rustling and chopping and hammering of insects, birds, wind in leaves, stone on wood. After completing the shelter, the man builds a pit and starts a fire by rubbing sticks together to ward off mosquitoes.

THE VIDEO quickly garnered millions of views, along with a heap of ecstatic comments hailing the channel's return. [Fans excitement was palpable, with frequent use of the world ''schoolgirl.'']

The channel has been dormant for two years, leading to speculation about what had happened to its owner, a fit, blond Australian named John Plant, who hadn't been seen on YouTube since the end of 2019, when he posted a video about making a pot out of wood and firing it in the kiln made in a video posted a month earlier. Then to take some time off to develop a cable show.

YOUTUBE IS A BOTTOMLESS WELL OF INSTRUCTIONAL CONTENT, brimming with how-tos and ''hack'' videos, but many follow a formula of wall-to-wall, undirectional talk.

In fact, the entire platform is predicated on a presumed parasocial relationship in which viewers are talked at by people who pretend to see them - content creators who face the camera, and greet the audience as though they are friends.

But Primitive Technology videos are all doing and no talking. There is no chirpy greeting, no acknowledgement of being observed at all.

It's not hard to see the appeal. These videos are marvels of soothing, hypnotic content, lulling the viewer into a kind of ambient trance. Part of this is their total immersion in nature and escape from the modern built environment.

Other than Plant's shorts, there appears to be nothing in the videos that have been manufactured or mass-produced. In what we see of Plant's world, every man-made thing is made by him and has clear antecedents in some previous thing he made.

Commenters like to describe this as a beautiful tautology. As someone wrote beneath the video in which Plant made bricks to build a kiln for firing bricks : “ ‘Yo, I need some bricks’/‘What for?’/‘More bricks’/‘OK.’”

Plant's technical skills are amazing, but perhaps even more singular, more impressive, is his monastic silence. In Plant's world, it is possible to bring a task to completion without interruption; it's a realm without meetings, without alarms, without management.

You can imagine how, as the cost of living soars and talk turns to the fragility of global supply chains and modern institutions, the idea off a guy living off the land in a beautiful forest is a comforting fantasy.

Because, obviously this is a fantasy: The videos are deftly edited and uploaded to the Internet, a high-tech portal to this low-tech world. They are ostensibly here to provide instruction, but they mostly provide a tech-addled audience with a brief respite from the very techno-capitalism that lets them watch - the everything that makes Plant's work possible, viable and lucrative.

More than two and a half centuries after the start of the Industrial Revolution, weno longer look upon the unspoiled world as a natural habit or privilege practical value over symbolic value.

If what Plant enacts resembles what was once our ''natural state'' - the way we lived before technology and social institutions altered every aspect of our existence - it is now something few of us in highly developed nations come into regular contact with or would know how to survive, let alone have enough dominion over the land to fell trees, build structures and bend it to our will.

The Honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on MultiMedia, YouTube and the World, continues. The World Students Society thanks author Carina Chocano.

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors, and Teachers of the world. See Ya all prepare and register for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society: wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter - !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless