YouTube, My Daughters, and Me [Video]

My daughter’s favorite television show is not a television show. It’s a YouTube series, “animated” in Minecraft, and created by an online star named Aphmau. I have mixed feelings about her watching it, not because it’s inappropriate, but because, well, it’s YouTube.

Look: I’m an English-majoring, creative-writing, British-television-loving snob. Why anyone would watch amateurs making short-form soap operas when there is a millennium of professionally edited content out there (Jane Austen, Citizen Kane, Mork & Mindy) is beyond me.

And yet, watching my daughter squeal over twentysomethings who have taught themselves video production inspires me. “Your young men will see visions,” the prophet Joel tells us. No, he wasn’t talking about YouTube, but still, a generation sidestepping the gatekeepers of creativity feels empowering. YouTube contains a lot of vapid vanity (as well as parodies of it), …