Village Life

I was watching a YouTube on the channel 'Jolly', where the small British team and frontman were getting the reactions of a number of groups of Americans to their eating British chocolate for the first time, on camera. All fairly innocuous stuff and quite entertaining content. But what stood out for me, as it has quite often these days, was the inclusion in the 'panel' of a fellow YouTube creator, Gotham Chess, aka Levy Rozman, whose channel I frequently watch.

It strikes me that YouTube is a pretty accurate mirror of that wonderfully regressive social construct, the 'Urban Village'. I say wonderfully regressive in the sense that the natural human tendency is to form manageable-sized relationship groups, even - perhaps more so - when living in a large metropolis alongside millions of others. Which makes sense, given the way societies develop: we feel safer and happier when we have a 'neighbourhood' that fits our scale and scope. We can easily cope with a mental map comprising a few hundred people in close community.

Close communities often group themselves in adjacent or nearby 'villages': think of the hipsterisation of the old East End of London, or the boho districts of New York and San Francisco, for instance. You can also see looser, more geographically diverse 'village' groupings in sports fans, cleaving to their common 'family': their love for and shared experiences - positive and negative - of their team's performances. It's interesting to reflect that as we migrated from rural origins to urban destinations, during the Industrial Revolution - by no means the first or last such move - we kept the closeness of 'village' with us.

And so it is with social media and the internet, only writ globally. Facebook and WhatsApp are a bit like the old community hall noticeboard for most users, X [formerly Twitter] is the argument down the pub, while for content creators there's YouTube, Flickr, et al. The one that's of most interest to me here though, is YouTube, where some of the most innovative media creativity now resides. The beauty of it though, is creators and consumers alike have gathered into virtual, global, 'villages', with like-minded individuals and groups sharing and monetising their skills and hobbies whilst just having fun. True, there are sink estates, barrios and no-go areas in this other world, but, unlike most of the other socmed™, it's easy to stick to the safety and comfort of one's own 'neighbourhood' if need be.

The curious thing is that what we might characterise as global village life is not quite as Marshall McLuhan envisaged fifty-odd years ago; as all things, all people connected, is not quite where we've ended up: we have done what is natural to us and taken the myriad affordances offered to us by the growth of global telecommunications and imposed our natural tendency towards village life upon it, despite the best effort of global capital to hog it completely: savvy digital natives understand the nature of the beast and, as in corporeal life, swerve the pitfalls and graze at will on the hedgerows of plenty that grow around them. I think there's definitely a deeper study hinted at here: I'll keep making notes such as these, and maybe one day I'll have a crack at the bigger picture in some form or another. Keep you posted...