Blue Scream of Jeff: March 2014

Sunday, March 30, 2014

Everything I Really Need to Know I learned on YouTube

As a writer and lover of the English language, it pains me to admit that when it comes to acquiring a new skill, I’m more a visual learner than a word guy.

It’s not that I can’t pickup how to do something by just reading an article or following a step-by-step guide in a book or magazine. But give me a series of pictures to look at, and I seem to instantly understand how something comes together (or, more often, gets taken apart).

I’ve always been that way, from the model kits I used to put together as a kid to the woodworking magazines I read today, which feature lots of photos and diagrams of projects in just about every stage of construction.

Even in my day job as a systems technician for a Pennsylvania-based news media company, I find myself turning time and again to visual guides to keep the company’s ever-growing array of high-tech gadgets running.

Contrary to popular belief we computer geeks aren’t born with an innate knowledge of how to breakdown and fix every piece of technology that lands on our workbenches. Sometimes even we need to turn to the Internet to find out how to repair something.

Lately my go-to site for this sort of thing has been Youtube. In just the past few months I’ve turned to the popular video upload site several times. First I needed to find out how to disassemble a Dell Inspiron 15z laptop, just so I could replace the inconveniently-located hard drive. (Seriously, what genius places the most failure-pone part of a laptop in a place where you have to completely disassemble the unit to replace it! Who does Dell think they are? Apple?)

Oh and speaking of Apple, my next trip to the site was to find out how to replace the digitizer (glass screen) on an iPad, that one of our employees had cracked – again. I’ve also used a Youtube video to help me replace the broken headphone connection on my third generation iPod and numerous times to find out how to accomplish a number of special effects in Adobe Photoshop.
also found myself turning to it for non-work stuff. I’ve mostly used it to find out how to do things in my woodworking shop, like cutting dovetails or tuning up some of my tools. But on occasion I’ve used it for more mundane things like finally figuring out how to fold a fitted bottom sheet of a bed, and that got me wondering what other “life- skill” videos I could find on the site.

So I recently went looking, and was somewhat surprised by the answer.

There were hundreds if not thousands of these types of videos! Now some of them are probably of dubious quality and I wouldn’t necessarily trust the self-proclaimed experts who made them, but the are still a staggering number of them. This reminded me of a book written back in the late 1980s, by a man named Robert Fulghum: “All I Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.”

In it, he postulated that everything one needs to get on in this world was learned in Kindergarten. Now admittedly, he wasn’t talking about things which my Occupational Therapist-wife calls Activities of Daily Living – or ADL for short – which are the skills a person needs in order to live an independent life. Fulghum was talking about rules of social conduct.

But just as important as learning how to share and “doing unto others as we have done unto us,” are knowing how to bath ourselves and taking care of our own personal hygiene; dressing; eating, feeding and cooking; doing house work; managing money; shopping; transport and even child and pet care.

And if you somehow missed learning any of these skills while you were growing up, YouTube has you covered. I found plenty of videos which cover these topics and I’ve sprinkled them throughout this blog. Some are down right amusing and some helpful (Yes, I did finally learn to fold that fitted bed sheet from a YouTube video).

So Mr. Fulghum, I respectfully suggest that you revise your book for today’s “Internet Generation.” I even have the title for you: “All I Really Needed to Know I Learned on Youtube.”