It’s now been five days since I moved to the United Kingdom. I’m still in self-isolation. In accordance with the NHS guidance, every day, I take a walk downstairs in my garden to get some fresh air. There’s a massive garden in the apartment complex I’m currently residing in, which gives me a wonderful view of the rest of the city while respecting my self-isolation restrictions.
This evening, on my walk, the prevailing thoughts that came to my head were largely centered around the fact that the life I will live and experience for the next nine months is a life that I’ve only previously seen on YouTube.
YouTube is a wonderful medium. I’ve expressed this sentiment before, but the true joy of short film for me is the perspective we receive. Watching vlogs gives you the opportunity to look at life through somebody else’s eyes, and documentaries and film always give you the chance to examine a character’s take on circumstances around them. I have loved YouTube for democratizing the content creation space for a long time now, and I’m grateful to have lived in a post-YouTube world for most of my childhood. I remember watching Ryan Higa and Dancing Turtle videos back in 2007, and the platform’s influence on my life grew massively when I was in Grades 9 and 10, largely owing to how much music I discovered there.
However, in that period of my life, I discovered several vloggers, and began to watch these videos of students in University towns in different cities. I claimed this assisted my research, enabling better decision-making when the time came for me to apply to University. In all honesty though, the vlogs were just ways of looking at different cities from a 20-something year-old’s view. I found the Oxvlog project, and Simon Clark, and all the Camvlogs and Jake Wright, which provided fuel to my UCAS application when I was younger. A few years later I discovered PaigeY, IbzMo and Ali Abdaal, who provided these wonderful views of Cambridge.
This afternoon, from my garden, I saw Spoon’s. The Regal Wetherspoon was a place Jake frequented in his vlogs, largely for dinner, and seeing it was surreal because although I was outside and rather far away from the place, I knew exactly what the interiors looked like, and what kind of discounts to anticipate once I showed them my student ID card. I saw a Nando’s and instantly Example & Ed Sheeran’s rap, The Nando Skank, began to play in my head.
This is just the beginning, but it really does feel strange to be in the locations I’ve only seen on YouTube. I remember in 2018, when one of my seniors moved to Oxford, my YouTube knowledge meant I knew about the closest pharmacy to her College. I used YouTube to learn about all this. My dad uses Google Maps. He’s given me some restaurant references already, and I’m sure he’ll know the geography of this place really soon, which I appreciate, because it means I have to explain less about my locality to him. It’s weird though. I’m living a YouTube life.
I’m not one for making films, but maybe this marks a opportune time to begin.
Tejas Rao 