Blog #7

For this blog I chose the EthanGamer kid because my younger brother is now almost 16 but since he was pretty young he watched a lot of gamers on youtube and things like that so I thought it might be interesting. I have never really understood the appeal of watching someone else play video games but I guess to some people it is like watching other people play sports. So the first video that I open up is just this kid playing a game called Turbo Dismount, where it seems that the objective of the game is to have your character have the most painful looking crashes and stuff. He was even younger than I imagined that he would be and after looking it up I found out that in that video he was only 7 or 8. He’s now 10 years old and he has 2.59 million subscribers on YouTube and he has his own merchandise line. He was also British to my surprise. 

All of the content that I found while I was looking through his channel was him doing stuff in games like Minecraft or Roblox or he is testing out new games and telling us how fun they are. When I went to see how he interacts with fans in the comments I found that comments were disabled on all of his videos. To me this seems like a really good idea because as I will talk about later, the internet is a dangerous place and for a child to have such a large platform and following I think there are dangers that can come with that. Although I do not know all that much about video games I kind of understand the purposes of games like Minecraft and Roblox.

He makes a lot of these videos that probably inspire forms of creativity in other kids and give them new ideas on how to have fun on their games. He also is a child with a child audience so he understands what they want to see whether it be the humor, the effects or the games. He also probably has more of a following as a result of his actual child friendly nature because more parents actually allow their kids to watch his videos. I was also surprised to find out that he has his own mobile game which came out a few months ago called Ethan Gamer Land. It looks kinda fun. Might have to try it out during quarantine. This is another way that he can keep his audience engaged and keep them coming back as I am sure people will begin playing his game and nobody will know his game better than him. Except for whoever actually made the game. 

I think there may be a lot of dangers to putting your kid online to create content like this, but I think that disabling comments is a great step towards a little more protection for him. Many people on the internet say weird and terrible things and especially in the gaming community as we saw through our learning about Gamergate. It has been found that men attempt to create masculine spaces online(Hodapp, 2019) and many men try to make online gaming a masculine space as well. Online abuse and harassment is just too prevalent as a result of the ability to hide behind screens. In his writing Crime, Justice and Social Media, Salter(2017) states “It has become apparent that abuse and harassment is a predictable and recurring feature of social media rather than just a ‘glitch’ or ‘bug’.” We know that social media increases risk of abuse and harassment which is why many people choose to keep their kids off the internet and social media until they are much older. As a result of the large platform that EthanGamer has you must expect some of this online behavior. Disabling the comments definitely helps and keeps other kids from seeing this behavior as well, but I am sure that Ethan still gets all kinds of messages with things that 10 year olds should not be hearing. It is also important to monitor what a child is putting out there for so many people to see in case he may share information such as addresses, contact information or other things that could be harmful as a result of him not realizing what the consequences may be. The other thing that I had to think about is the type of money this kid has to be making. With that large of a following along with his own merchandise and his own mobile game this kid must be rolling in the cash. If his parents are smart and monitor and control his finances then this can be great and he can save up for college and possibly even have more money left over. However, if he is just doing whatever he wants with his money then I would hate to see the types of things this kid is getting into as well as the fact that he could be exploited or manipulated as a child with so much money. 

I think that for the most part, and definitely comparatively to what else kids may watch online nowadays, this is one of the better things that parents could be letting their kids watch, but as with pretty much anything online there may still be a few dangers. The first video that I watched as I said was him playing a game where he would try to make his character have the worst wipeouts. This could be dangerous to expose kids to this kind of violence and normalize it in their minds. Many video games have violence in them and many people also believe that it has affected the way that younger people view violence. These videos also encourage a ton of video game playing which can lead to great creativity skills and hand-eye coordination, but there are many more productive things to do than to play video games and it may be dangerous to encourage this much video game playing. 

References:

Hodapp, C. (2019). Mens Rights, Gender, And Social Media. S.l.:Lexington Books.

Salter, M. (2017). Crime, justice and social media. London: Routledge.