Like all good addicts, I couldn’t tell you how much time I’ve spent with First Time Hearing clips on YouTube. They sucked me in and didn’t let me go
Read more in the Internet wormhole series
Oh the pleasant pain of waiting impatiently for someone to understand the point! Oh the power of dramatic irony; the smug joy of knowing something they don’t.
Oh how I wallowed in these feelings and more, when YouTube sucked me into a genre I had previously known nothing about: First Time Hearing videos, where people film themselves watching the music video of a song they’ve never heard before and grace viewers with their impromptu reactions, thoughts and facial expressions.
Even before noticing the six-figures-plus viewing counts and the apparently endless number of people vying to deliver more, I instantly clocked all the trappings of the very best attention economy traps. You know: the immediate, certain knowledge that – despite your best intentions, growing hunger, thirst and backpain; despite the increasingly urgent pleas of your neglected children – you’re just going to slump there swiping your finger for hours until your higher brain finally kicks in.
