YouTube: Is It Really the Devil?

Much has been made in the magic community of YouTube and the various exposure videos and channels up and running on the site. It's drawn a lot of criticism, not always undeserved. But how bad is it really?

I'm of the opinion that magicians make a bigger deal of their secrets than is necessary, and in the grand scheme of things YouTube really isn't that big a threat to us. The exposure videos are annoying, but if you're good at what you do, you can still maintain the mystery to your show. There are obvious ethical concerns with the exposure channels, especially the ones trying to monetize them, but that's not really what I want to address here.

See, what I think is the bigger problem with YouTube exposure videos is how crap most of them are. A lot of newbies go online looking for a place to get started, and unfortunately the exposure videos are pretty convenient. I'm not angry with the newbies. They don't know what's considered proper procedure in this community. How could they? It's not like we go out of our way to publicize it. And doing so would just draw more attention to the exposure monkeys and killjoys anyway.

The problem this creates however, and it is one that we have to be aware of in order to remedy, is that a lot of new guys end up getting their start learning from a bunch of incompetent teenage attention whores with the manual dexterity of a three-toed sloth. I've said it before, but it's worth repeating: YouTube tutorials are to learning magic what a Swiss army knife is to open heart surgery. The overwhelming majority of guys who post these videos are terrible magicians and worse performers. I've looked up some of these videos, believe me. They couldn't deliver good scripting to save a burning orphanage, their hands are all stiff and weird like they're doing an impersonation of a robot at the bottom of the uncanny valley, and they have the timing and character of a fart in the middle of a eulogy. Their webcam performances could not be any worse unless they were stabbing you in the face is what I'm saying.

Yet this is where a lot of new guys get their start. And it's a bad thing because then they develop bad habits early on and they have to spend time breaking them. Time they could have spent refining the material they have or gaining a better understanding of the fundamentals. Learning from YouTube is one step forward, two steps back.

But ultimately the magic community must share a certain amount of blame here. Being as dramatic about our secrets as we are, there's a certain degree of outsider unfriendliness and suspicion. Guys turn to YouTube because other magicians don't make themselves very approachable. The majority of us aren't complete jerkoffs, granted. It's more a sense of complacency. It's an unintended side effect of our culture of secrecy.

So YouTube is not the threat many of us imagine it is. The problem it presents is more indirect. And the best we can do to combat it is to just step back and consider if perhaps we might be acting a bit too secretive. If more newbies discover early on that there are better ways to learn and that we will happily volunteer that information, we'll see the audience for the exposure monkeys shrinking. They'll never truly go away, but marginalizing them means there will be fewer new guys who get a bad start due to the incompetence of Magic Exposure Channel #347.