Tom Nicholas
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A New Video and a New Website | The Friday(ish) Update
🕑 Added 2021-09-12 16:39:18 +0000 UTCWelcome back to another edition of the Friday(ish) update!
I will never forgive myself for being so specific with the day when I named these but Saturday Night Live had already stolen the more usefully vague Weekend Update...
What have I been up to this week?
This week, I've been splitting my focus between two main tasks...
Firstly, I've been building a bit of momentum with the writing of my next video. To give you an insight into what I'm working on, my starting point for the piece I'm currently writing is a video by the educational science YouTube channel Veritasium.
Some of you may, like me, have been recommended a video by this channel a couple of months ago called Why You Should Want Driverless Cars On Roads Now. The video argues that autonomous vehicles are safer than their human-driven alternatives and have the potential to save lives and improve our urban environments.
That the video should argue that, however, is little surprise given that it was sponsored by Waymo—the successor to Google's self-driving car project.
The primary goal is therefore to explore quite how much sponsorships of the kind engaged in by Veritasium (and Johnny Harris in his video for the World Economic Forum—this video is something of a spiritual successor to that one) require the creator to bend the truth. Fans of my Elon Musk video will also be interested in some of the ways this video will engage in questions of techno-optimism too.
The writing seems to be going pretty well and, while there will be ongoing research throughout the writing process with this one, I think it will be slightly more rapid in its turnaround that some of my more recent epics!
The second task I've been undertaking this week has been doing some further work on my new website—the main hope for which is to enable Patreon supporters to be able to browse the growing archive of scripts and commentary videos far more easily than Patreon itself will allow.
This has been an ongoing project for some time and takes a backseat when I'm nearing any deadlines but is nearly there now. In fact, I was hoping to be able to share it with you today had I not run into a last-minute hurdle!
Anyway, that will be launching soon and I think will make it far, far easier to access the various bits of Patreon exclusive content included in your tiers!
And outside of work?
Last weekend saw the culmination of lots and lots of non-work work when I ran the 10k race I've been training for. My hope signing up for the race had been to run it under 1 hour. When I walked to the starting line, I was hoping for 55 minutes. In the end, it went really, really well and I completed it in 49 minutes and 59 seconds!
The training plan I was following obviously did the trick as, after weeks and weeks of hard work, I felt really good and fresh when the race began and, although it got very painful towards the end, everything just seemed to work out.
I've already signed up for a half marathon in December to try and push myself even further!
What have I been reading/watching/listening to?
I have to admit, my watching habits this week have been fairly low brow.
Me and my partner are currently watching the BBC series Vigil which is a fairly standard thriller set on a nuclear submarine. Given that we live quite near one of the UK's nuclear submarine bases (and, in fact, the "graveyard" where at least one "retired" ship has been sitting for 30 years whilst the government decide what to do with them), it can be quite disconcerting watching!
I also watched the lates Disney film, Luca, last night which is good fun. I don't think it's a particularly outstanding film but there are a couple of characters in there which are good for a few laughs!
If, like me, you're a fan of the occasional bit of trash TV, I would recommend We're In Hell's latest video about the Netflix reality show Blown Away. It's a lot of fun, particularly if you've watched the show in question.
Other than that, I'm still trying to finish my book about the industrial history of North East England!
What have I been thinking about?
My thinking this week has largely been about my upcoming video and echoes some thoughts from a previous week.
I'm trying to strike the balance between highlighting some troubling ethical practices with regard to allowing corporations to influence the content of supposedly educational videos whilst also trying to avoid making anything too sneering.
I'm always much more interested in the broad trends than attacking individuals but I also don't want to avoid getting into the substance of the issue which is only really possible with reference to real-world examples!
As I continue work on my second video about how corporations and other elite institutions are using YouTube as a vector of misinformation, the thought that there might be a book in here somewhere keeps returning to me too. I may put a proposal together at some point but whether I've got the time to write it amid making videos is another matter.
Thanks for reading this edition of the Friday Update! This week I'm hoping to put out both a call-out for the next Patreon Q&A and a link to the new website when I've ironed out the final creases. So keep an eye out for those!
Comments
Tom Nicholas
I think I've managed to solve this problem now! There turned out to be a bunch of other videos that had been sponsored by Waymo at the same time which enables me to stress that I'm using this video as an example of something which is not unique. And, so far, I think this is helping to keep it feeling productive rather than too brash. Also, there's definitely something about the manner in which we interpret spectacle as inherently unserious. I think I've talked about this on stream before but we see it in the way that even the most ridiculous of podcasts are generally thought of as more "intellectual" than anything video-related (or I definitely fall into the trap of thinking that anyway!).
Paul Thronson
I appreciate your efforts to be entertaining (sensational/fun production) while not making the information sensational (propaganda). I'm not sure if I'm saying this correctly, but it seems if the information itself is more about conditioning a feeling and a reaction then it is available for critical consumption, we are dealing with propaganda and for sure it can be hard to parse out the production side from the information provided. I think people understand sensationalism is intuitively unserious, but I think a lot of the time we just assume a fun production equates to less serious information and maybe that would be an interesting topic?
