What's So Bad About Autoplay
How we're all encouraged to never choose
If you dig into the YouTube support pages (you can read it yourself here) you’ll find the following:
The Autoplay feature on YouTube makes it easier to decide what to watch next.
Well—it’s true. But wildly understated. Because if you’ve watched video content in the past five years, you almost certainly have watched a video on autoplay. It’s what happens when you finish one video and another one immediately queues up. It doesn’t just make it easier to decide what to watch next, it makes that decision for you.
Honestly, it seems like a tidy solution to one of those problems we have all encountered from time to time. Who hasn’t spent an evening scrolling through Netflix, then Hulu, then YouTube, just looking for what would be exactly what you want to watch, only to end up spending more time selecting what to watch than actually watching. It sounds nice to have someone select something for you. But who is choosing? And for what purposes?
If you go back to that YouTube support page, you’ll find another interesting note. This feature is automatically turned off if the account belongs to someone under the age of 17. This, I imagine, comes from knowing that this autoplay feature isn’t neutral. It’s a way of continuing to offer something more dramatic, more compelling, and often more extreme. This is not a good feature for children, but I would also propose not a good feature for adults.
It’s a feature I worry about for those who are a part of my congregation. For over two years I have directed folks to Facebook to watch our church services. Once our livestream is over, however, the videos don’t stop. Facebook will automatically start playing something else for my congregants. Maybe they understand autoplay, but maybe they don’t.
It reminds me of what happens when nice church folks try to search information about the bible online. A basic Google search doesn’t typically send back the thoughtful, researched content one would hope for. You’re just as likely to get an ad-laden, conspiratorial website full of…well, anything.
It’s easy to be passive. If we make it about an individual moral choice, we’re missing something, too. We now live in a world of autoplay. We’re too tired to actively choose, so we just let the videos go. We might not even be aware of what’s happening.
We’re part of a big system at work, but we can do just one small thing. If your congregation is using Facebook or YouTube to share worship services, add a little disclaimer or do a five minute PSA. Encourage folks to turn of autoplay. Let them know it’s a way of protecting ourselves from extreme content, from media passivity, and from a system that knows how to placate us.
Just turn autoplay off.
More links, please
Fall study ideas
Like many, my church’s usual patterns of Adult Education have been completely upended by the pandemic. We’re still looking for ways to meet via Zoom or more casually in homes. I was very interested to find in Diana Butler Bass’ recent newsletter a compilation of her writing on Christian Nationalism plus some added questions for discussion. It would make a great Zoom study or reading for personal reflection with options to subscribe and read more as wanted.
What life looks like
Working on music arranging from my collection of old hymnals