What are strange clickbait videos doing to our kids’ brains?
YouTube is awash with baffling cartoons that make no sense – and my daughter loves them
Kids love YouTube. You might have fond childhood memories of sitting glued to the box, but the endless variety and instant gratification of YouTube make it ten times as addictive. My daughter Scarlett happily spends hours flicking through singalong nursery rhymes, cartoons and the odd Bollywood production number. One thing we’ve noticed, though, is that some of the videos she ends up watching are a little strange. And I’m not just talking about Superstar Rajinikanth. For example, one of her favourite videos is an animation entitled Five Little Monkeys Jumping On The Bed. It lasts about an hour, during which the titular nursery rhyme is sung over and over again, over computer-generated scenes of monkeys falling out of bed.
What’s odd is that the scenes don’t exactly repeat. Each time around the storyboard is identical, but the animation and music are slightly different. It’s as if someone set out to make exactly the same video two dozen times, but using different clip-art each time.
This has never exactly bothered me, but I’ve often wondered about the motivation behind it. Then, this month, an interesting analysis by artist James Bridle popped up on my Twitter feed ( pcpro.link/280bridle) and filled in some of the blanks
Bridle reveals that Five Little Monkeys is far from the strangest child-oriented video on YouTube. In a long discussion, he picks out numerous examples of videos that seem somehow “off”, some of them in much more uncomfortable ways. For example, there’s a video in which the headless body of Disney’s Aladdin stands in the centre of the screen; various heads circle around it, to the bafflingly inappropriate tune of “Daddy finger, daddy finger, where are you?” When the wrong head lands on the body, Agnes from Despicable Me inexplicably slides on from the side of the screen and cries; when the head and body match, she laughs.
As Bridle notes, this is disconcerting partly because it’s not exactly sinister. I’d struggle to come up with a reason to bar Scarlett from watching it. Again, it’s just hard to imagine why someone would make this particular video in this particular way.
The answer, Bridle surmises, is that publishers are playing a numbers game, trying to flood YouTube with child-friendly videos, so as to attract as many views as possible and thus rake in a few dollars. Ideas like artistry and inspiration don’t enter into it: studio workers in India and the Far East simply smash together a selection of kidfriendly concepts, visuals and music, upload the results and start working on to the next permutation. Bridle calls this an algorithmic approach, but to me that implies a computer putting things together according to a blindly mechanistic set of rules. These videos must be, to some extent, assembled by humans – which, frankly, I find rather creepier.
From my point of view, of course, the real question is how we’re supposed to respond as parents. These videos don’t seem to do Scarlett any harm, but nor are they exactly engaging stuff. The adventures of Peppa Pig have her laughing, cheering and singing along; Five Little Monkeys, with its formulaic, repetitive format, is more likely to mesmerise her into a goggle-eyed trance. It’s good for a bit of peace and quiet, but it’s not teaching her anything positive.
And if we do decide that we don’t want her watching this type of content, what can we do? Here Bridle seems a bit forlorn: “I have no idea how [YouTube] can respond without shutting down the service itself, and most systems which resemble it,” he laments. And admittedly I’d hesitate myself to click the “Report” button on one of these surreally formulaic videos, simply because I’d struggle to explain exactly what was wrong with it – in terms that couldn’t also apply to The Magic Roundabout.
But in this day and age, we don’t need to rely on self-reported user ratings. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Face ID sensor on the new iPhone X, and about how it enables “animoji” by tracking your facial expression in real time. The connection might not seem obvious, but what if YouTube used a similar system, not to mimic your face, but to track how you’re reacting to what’s on screen? It could see when a scene makes you smile, detect when your attention is wandering – and register when you’ve been lulled into a semi-hypnotic state.
The idea isn’t exactly new. When TV studios pilot new shows, they sometimes equip audience members with little dials that they can twist to register how much they’re enjoying each scene. Having your facial expressions tracked while you watch isn’t too different, except that you don’t have to bother with any of that tedious twisting.
This sort of data could move us beyond the simplistic paradigm of things being either good, bad or banned. YouTube could very quickly get to know which videos surprised and delighted the viewer, and bump them to the front of the queue. It would also know if a video caused kids to recoil in horror, like some of the nastier uploads Bridle found, and could quickly flag or demote them.
Some of you will hate this idea, I know. It feels a little dystopian even to me. But like it or not, we’re living in the age of data; it’s a fact of life that our behaviour is going to be monitored and measured – and that doesn’t have to work against us. If technology can help steer our progeny away from soulless, algorithmically-generated media – and towards more inspired, life-affirming creations – then it could actually make us, and the digital world we live in, more human.
Like it or not, we’re living in the age of data – it’s a fact of life that our behaviour is going to be monitored and measured