The Way Of YouTube

The Way Of YouTube

"I have found that people generally are too trusting, and that can have a bad impact on your market."

One of the clearest examples I can remember of this was when a political satire show posted a video about the Governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie. I had the opportunity to view the video that was a few minutes long, and in it you could see a man sitting at his computer, who was likely the producer. He was talking directly to a camera and was advocating for Governor Christie. While he didn't push his political views in the video, it was the producer that was responsible for the message of the video.

Is Your Content "Fake" Enough?

Now, you may be thinking "This person didn't make this video!" It's true that he didn't, but he was the one who gave it the power to reach over a million people. The video was posted on various Facebook pages and was created by someone that they could trust, with their own political beliefs, who probably agreed with their own.

The problem was that people believed the content of the video and it gained an incredible amount of traction.

You see, people like to see things that confirm what they already believe. If you make content that is contrary to what you believe, then it is natural that people would see that as a red flag. For instance, some of my clients have used their real locations in order to show their support for their respective cause, and in doing so, people quickly see that as a farce. In addition, if you used your real pictures, you were technically lying to people.

If Your Social Media Followers Believe What You Say, You Won't Ever See Them

There are a couple of things that I see often in these types of situations. The first is that a lot of people believe what they read and see on social media, and they go into it blindly. It seems like common sense, but there are many examples out there where it is not.

Debate Saga

An increasingly common approach to studying the situations for debate is the observational approach of the comparative scholar, which is to ask others to study the situation and provide you with their explanation of what happened, usually in one word. This method is used by YouTube video debates to highlight cognitive issues in a way that is accessible to everyone who watches a video. Here’s a YouTube video series by Cathy Newman in which she explains, in one word, situations for debate:

Dissection Video Comparing Two Concepts

This is the method of the cognitive sciences of science where you can deconstruct the situation and ask cognitive questions of your own. To demonstrate how this method might work, let’s dissect the debate video above with one more issue, like what actually happened when Davidson compared Roosevelt’s name with the way that Trotsky’s name has been subjected to ridicule. By contrasting situations, you can begin to learn the difference between situations and discussions.

There are many videos online that explain the topics of debate better than I ever could and if you’re interested in learning more, then it’s a great time to check out the above resources for cognitive analysis in debates, comparative analysis, cognitive psychology and thinking and explaining

In the video above, Davidson gives three separate examples of his comparisons of FDR’s and Trotsky’s names to illustrate the cognitive issues of comparing names. At the beginning he says that we would find it difficult to respond to two statements that apply to everyone, for instance saying “FDR is bigger than Hitler”. This is a clever statement that allows him to change the nature of the debates without being questioned for changing the facts.

He then draws an analogy from the relationship of Stalin’s name and Hitler’s name. This analogy breaks down. For Stalin’s name, we would find it easier to respond to two statements, comparing Stalin to Hitler and saying “Stalin’s name is bigger than Hitler’s name”. We would still understand the context, we would still understand what was meant, we would still be able to explain it and explain our meaning. For Stalin’s name, it would be easy to offer an explanation explaining the comparison and describing the cognitive problems we might have responding to it. For Stalin’s name, the method of comparing names would allow us to explain how he is bigger than Hitler in the first place and therefore not responding to the comparison would not be necessary.

In the video above, Davidson compares Roosevelt’s name with Hitler’s and the words are easy to understand and explain. So what’s the problem? Well, we don’t have an example of the words “Trump’s name is bigger than Hitler’s name”. We don’t know how this compares. If we want to make a statement like this, we have to draw a comparison to identify the cognitive differences and that comparison, of course, will be relative to the situations. We can never say it’s true for everyone, only comparing it to the situations, that is the way to discuss these things. The cognitive debates which come out of these videos and social media videos are debates between those who think in terms of comparing situations that actually are similar, like Roosevelt and Hitler and those who think in terms of comparing situations that actually are different, like Stalin and Trotsky. When the contrast is made with these two alternatives, we can explain the cognitive processes that are involved.

In the video below, Davidson compares the Trump name with the Roosevelt name, comparing the two as the names of presidents. So far we haven’t needed any descriptions to understand that the Roosevelt name is not bigger than the Trump name, it is exactly the same in the way the Stalin name is different from Hitler’s name. If we actually made an analogy, we could explain what happened to help explain the situation. So the issue of mental image formation is at the heart of these debates about mental imagery and Donald Trump’s mental image of Hitler.

Again, to explain it more simply, the technique of mental image formation is what happens when you take a situation that is very similar to one that already exists and you change the way in which you interpret it to make the original situation seem different to someone who hasn’t already seen the original situation. The most important of these situations is the difference between the killing of Hitler and Roosevelt.