I've come as close to hitting the "subscribe" button on YouTube as ever after finding the Falconry and Me channel, and apparently I'm not the only one. Last week when I first hit upon it, the channel had 22k?-ish? subscribers. Now it's at 45k and still climbing. The first few videos date from six years ago and follow a familiar routine for internet audiences: videos of baby birds growing up, set to soft music, titled in Lucida Handwriting. Artsiness. Feels. Marketability. Or at least such an attitude and gimmickry as we've grown up being told to adopt in dealing with others, creating a brand image. After that, several years of silence.
So what enabled its impressive resurgence a couple of months ago? An exotic topic helps. Quick, tell me everything you know about falconry! Nothing? Thought so. The presenter being a pleasant young female certainly helps; she'd have to put a helluva lot more effort into keeping people's attention as a balding middle-aged male. A British accent always sounds better too.
But alright, lest I wax too lupine vis-a-vis homini, there are some very valid reasons why she deserves her success. Despite her channel being ostensibly centered on falcons, it's her raven Fable that's been stealing the show (a million hits just for her introductory video) - chatty, clever and a bit of a diva! The birds in general are also in sparkling good health and obviously very much at ease with their caretaker. Mostly though I'm impressed with the delivery. Prop the camera up, grab some hook-beaked nightmare from the night's Plutonian shore and just start showing it off, explaining and demonstrating. The videos are well edited, focused, simple and straightforward, the delivery clear, the information neither terse nor whatever the hell antonym of terse I'm exemplifying here. They are both interesting and pleasant to watch, and though I haven't the slightest intention of ever raising a bird of prey, much of her advice would apply to caring for and interacting with other animals in general.
Remember how nearly impossible it was for anyone to publish anything in itself and for itself before YouTube, WordPress, Blogger, various comic strip hosting services, etc. without genuflecting before the gods incarnate of Condé Nast or Warner Brothers. The ability to address one's potential audience directly, sidestepping gatekeepers, has among other things revealed how much of our previous decades' culture grew not out of cultural discourse but out of the barriers imposed by hierarchical control over the means of (content) production. Impartial hosting, publication and self-publication has allowed us to once again present a thing in itself, without being forced to bundle it with a corporate boardroom's best guess of what might sell in the next quarter. Look up how many now-respected Science Fiction stories or authors owed their existence or careers to Playboy, for fuckable's sake, because they didn't fit the particular brand image of other publications!
A million people have now watched a carrion-eater lovingly crooning "boop-boop" at her owner. Fifty thousand people are eagerly awaiting the next video on the grave and dire threat of frayed jesses, and other terms most of us have probably only encountered in The Once and Future King.
In case you can't figure it out, this blog post was about the importance of Internet freedom.
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