Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream…
Internet self-expression evolves. And I've been there from the beginning: First I got into forums on BBSs and later CompuServe, Prodigy and AOL. I read posts, and downloaded binaries, from a wide variety of quite specialized interest Usenet Newsgroups and, before long, frequented personal web pages built by average Joes on sites like GeoCities.
Then came social media sites like MySpace and later Facebook but they seemed too curtailed. Content needed to fit within their pre-ordained parameters. Yes, Twitter, Instagram and even TikTok offer instant gratification freaks their fix to be connected in almost the moment.
But blog sites like this (Blogger) were more to my liking. You may have to wait until a user posted after a while, but if the poster was fairly good at writing and composition, it was a fuller experience than "Gee, look at my plate of food at tonight's restaurant!" BS.
YouTube, with the ability for posters to fully edit their experiences was another level up and the Age of the Bloggers soon morphed into the Age of the Vloggers, for those who wanted a more visual format, of course. I stuck with blogging because for me I'd rather mull an experience over and mold my reader's experience into something more refined and tailored. And so it was for the vlogger set as well except they were tailoring the experience within the realm of the visual rather than the written.
But neither the blogger or the vlogger were so bold enough to go fully live. Perhaps it was the technology, perhaps it was the fear of the unknown, live streaming was a very, very niche market until fairly recently. But now that it's here, I'm following my voyerist heart and I'm lovin' it through and through.
Does this mean I'm going to start a live stream? Fuck no! I barely tolerate the vlog style videos I do put on my YouTube channel. I can't imagine the cahones it takes to go live IRL on the sites that support it. I mean, it's live! Who knows what's gonna happen?
But that's the rub, isn't it? And that's why I like to watch it. Pros: It's live and you can usually chat live with the creator and others in real time! Cons: It's unedited and raw so you may have hours of boring footage or out-of-focus, poor audio content to deal with.
Jimi The Hobo is undoubtedly my currently favorite IRL streamer.
I found Jimi a few years ago when I was first exploring living a nomad life. Jimi's YouTube channel was focused on him homeless and living in a small car in New Mexico. These early videos were vlog style, taped then uploaded a day or so later. Through his trials and tribulations over the subsequent years, he kept posting videos as he moved both into better and worse situations. He showed his travels through the American Southwest, Cambodia, The United Kingdom, Mexico and Canada. He met a woman in Canada who seems to be amused by him and from the looks of her LinkedIn profile, she's not worrying about money so once Jimi secured her confidence, he started live streaming. The girlfriend, for whatever reason, prefers to stay off camera but never the less we now have a regular feed of live IRL glimpses into the life of this very opinionated, crass and right-wing leaning blowhard. But you know what? He's really fucking interesting. Hey, I'm not posting this to promote him. This is mainly to remind me that his content was of interest during this specific time.
And isn't that what the internet and its global connectivity is all about? Just like we developed in the old skool days. It's about satisfying the curiosity that we have, at the moment. We can read history books if we want to focus on the past. We can read sci-fi if we want to speculate about the future. But if we want to know what's going on, right now....and I mean RIGHT NOW, around the world, we embrace the internet and, thanks to the bold pioneers of our IRL live content providers, everywhere and anywhere, we now can experience what they do, as it happens, mundane or, we secretly hope, absolutely spectacular.