Years ago, Charles Murray came up with something called the Bubble Test, a quiz that was supposed to help you determine how much of a cultural bubble you lived in. At the time, Murray’s thesis was pretty simple: there was a certain (upper) class of Americans that went about their day to day lives never encountering most of the things that another group of Americans encountered constantly. This led people to say things like “no one ever eats at Chili’s” when it was one of the most popular restaurants in the country.

While the Bubble test itself is now likely outdated, I’ve spent a lot of time recently talking to various friends of mine about a new bubble I see developing: the YouTube bubble. Or the TikTok bubble. Whatever you want to call it, as someone currently parenting a 13 year old who hangs out with lots of other people currently parenting 13 year olds (+/-), we are often amazed what a dominate force YouTube and TikTok have become for a huge portion of the population (mostly under a certain age), and yet an equally huge portion of the population has no idea.

Wanna test yourself quickly? Ok:

1. Do you know who Mr Beast is?
2. Do you know what a mukbang video is?
3. Do you understanding livestreaming and bits/superchats?

I actually ask that first one a lot in social situations, and every single person who has children (or is exposed to children) 7-18ish nods immediately yes and anyone who is childless or has smaller children looks clueless. Mr Beast is a 27 year old who is the most subscribed to YouTuber in the world, and the third most subscribed to TikToker in the world. He has substantially more subscribers (over 450 million) than the US has residents (over 350 million), and his most popular video alone ($456,000 Squid Game in Real Life!) is closing in on a billion views.

It’s an interesting test to run in mixed company because people who don’t know who he is are always a bit surprised at exactly how insanely famous (along with a likely $500 million net worth) this man has gotten without them noticing. To be clear, I don’t consider this a deficit on anybody’s part. The nature of fame has changed in the last few decades, and you no longer have to appear on mainstream shows/movies/radio to become famous. What this does mean however, is that there are a lot of these subcultures that get a lot weirder than people expect from the outside.

Which brings me to question 2 and mukbang videos. Mukbang videos, in the simplest sense, are broadcast eating. People sit on camera and talk to their audience while eating a bunch of food. That’s pretty much it. I was thinking of this earlier this week when I discovered that the third most popular true crime YouTube channel (6 million subscribers) got their start doing this while discussing true crime cases. Could you imagine suffering a horrible death in your family and then finding out a YouTuber was discussing it while performatively eating chicken wings? I’m not linking to the videos, but if you want to read her fans discussing how much they miss it here you go.

I think this is interesting for a few reasons. As covered above, this type of fame can create an interesting imbalance in the public: someone can be wildly famous with millions of people and virtually unknown with most others in a way that wasn’t totally possible even 20 years ago. 20 years ago, someone who didn’t know a particular famous person probably didn’t know almost any famous person. Now, it’s possible for someone to watch every new Netflix show/movie and still not know who Mr Beast is. Conversely, I think this has changed some of the nature of fame for these stars themselves.

First, there has been a lot of research in to the mental health of content creators, and it’s not particularly good. I couldn’t find a study that directly compared the mental health of more traditional actors or TV personalities to digital creators, but there’s a few reasons to think the mental health situation for content creators might be worse.

There’s a few reasons for this: algorithms are less predictable than bosses. One change to the way YouTube does things can increase or decrease your stats overnight. People can get strikes on their account for reasons that are often opaque. Competition is fierce and hours are long. With traditional media jobs, if you go to a try out and don’t get the part, the public doesn’t see you. With YouTube, you are still on the platform as long as you want to keep trying. You have all the same pressures a small business owner does, but in this case you are the primary product. A restaurant owner may find someone else who can cook their recipes to give them a day off, a content creator can’t have someone else make their videos for a week. Other creators may start feuds with you to boost their own profiles in a way that you can’t control.

It may not be the biggest change, but one of the most interesting changes to me that many seem unaware of is that changing nature of parasocial relationships. First noted in 1956, a parasocial relationship is basically when a person feels an emotional bond with a person or character they have never met. In the 60 year review of the concept, the authors lead with the example of a student whose aunt dressed up the day two of her favorite TV characters got married because “she didn’t want to let them down”. That’s a parasocial relationship. These relationships are often called “one sided” and can bring their own problems, but the advent of livestreaming brought about a new type of creator/fan interaction: the one and a half sided relationship.

This brings me to the answer to that third question. That last paper takes a look at the livestreaming platform Twitch. The authors start by noting that ” “microcelebrities” via live streaming has shifted the nature of parasocial relationship away from the classic one-sided relationship and towards a “one-and-a-half” sided relationship characterized by the potential for reciprocal communication, strong community affiliation, fandom cultures, wishful identification, high emotional engagement, and increased presence.” During livestreams, fans can submit questions or comments (superchats), give creators gifts, or do other things with their money to get direct shout outs from the creators themselves.

In other words, unlike people who used to have a favorite celebrity they could only ever dream of meeting, people who follow content creators who livestream can regularly interact with them…for a price. This is not just a business model on YouTube, TikTok and Twitch, but is a lot of how OnlyFans works. It’s a rather unsettling set up when you realize that those most prone to extreme parasocial relationship were already those most prone to other addictions. As noted, all of this actually creates more dedicated fan bases than we have seen previously, as they actually are interacting with their favorite celebrity and others in the community regularly.

So what is the point of all of this? Well, as I mentioned in my true crime post, when I started to see these dynamic pop up in my town, I was taken by surprise. Failure to know about the YouTube ecosystem does not exempt you or anything you love from becoming fodder for it. But more than that, when I’ve talked to people about this, they are often in denial about how influential these YouTubers can be (surely I would have heard of them!), how normalized bizarre content can be (no one would ever just watch people eat!), and how dedicated their fans can be (how bad can it be???). That’s not reality, that’s your bubble speaking. If you don’t recognize the name of a YouTuber who has more subscribers than the US has citizens, what makes you think you’d understand the influence of one of the smaller ones?

My point here is that Bubbles like Murray talked about don’t just form based on class or where you live, they can form for all sorts of reasons. I think the next frontier in this is the changing nature of fame and how we process culture. Already with nearly every major event, people are showing up trying desperately to record a viral moment, they see events through the lens of content creators we may have never heard of but that they feel extremely attached to, and they try to push the envelope with trends that seem completely opaque to outside eyes. YouTube is set to surpass Disney in terms of media revenue (excluding parks, etc), and yet due to the less historic and more fractured nature of it’s content, people still think of it as a niche interest. If that’s how you view it, it might be worth poking around taking a look at what you’re not seeing. It’s a wild world out there.