Knowing and Nudging Terroir Part One

Matt Gielen, CEO of Little Monster Media Co. and sometime writer with Tubefilter, created a good taxonomy of YouTube a couple of years ago. Using Gielen’s taxonomy here, the video format that is most relevant to where we are going today with this piece is the “Challenge” or “Challenge/React Hybrid” videos.

Being a producer, or “creator,” on any of these social media and broadcast platforms is as manipulated by algorithms as is the experience of the consumer. Both creators and consumers are part of the experiment in how certain natural instincts of ours can be leveraged by capital – it’s about the flow of money.

But that whole mess is not where I am going with this piece. I am rather building on the Terroir Series and on the practice of Enviraikido: recognizing the underpinning of your personal human terroir and then developing a gentle observer role within that terroir for the purpose of refining the expression of terroir without overwhelming or suppressing it altogether.

Lefie (pronounced Leafy) is a YouTube creator and I will preface this by saying that while I really enjoy her perspective and work, she is primarily a challenge-format creator and inevitably that will include diet. So, for those of you dealing with an eating disorder and who are respectful of your sensitivities to our healthist and fattist culture, maybe just stick with watching this video of hers for right now. This video is just five minutes so it was worth embedding here:

The basic premise Lefie presents is that small changes that challenge you within your life essentially train you to navigate either a change that is dumped on you externally, or perhaps a change you have chosen but seems a bit overwhelming nonetheless.

And in introducing small changes during times where you are not otherwise stressed, you develop a repertoire of examples of having adjusted to the change, or at least having survived the change, therefore providing you with comfort if you tend to catastrophize and veer towards anxiety and dread around possible future unwanted changes to your life that you do not think you might be able to navigate or even survive.

The challenge format on YouTube has a large creator base and equally large following. The format ranges from shock/click-bait stuff to more measured and developed content such as the example from Lefie above. The challenge-react format is when the creator enacts the challenge and then at the end of the video shares with the viewer what they have learned from the experience. This format is stuffed to the gills with diet and exercise challenges of course.

Vicarious Change Challenges

Both creators and consumers tend to assume that the value of these videos to consumers is that it inspires them to attempt similar changes in their own lives.

But you can be pretty sure that these person-to-person media platforms are well aware of the mirror neuron network theory in human brains and that this can be leveraged for further advertisement viewing.

Mirror Neuron Network

In the Rebounding to Calm Series I explained the mirror neuron network in human brains in Part Two of the series under the sub-heading Self and Other Not One and the Same. While there is much disagreement in the scientific community on whether dedicated mirror neurons exist in the human brain as they do with macaque monkeys, the bottom line is that seeing and doing are very melded modules in all primate brains (maybe all brains).

The studies I referenced in Rebounding to Calm showed that the same regions of our brains have increased blood oxygenation and flow whether we pick up a glass on the table or we watch someone else do it; the same is true for experiencing emotion and watching another person experience those emotions.  

Really these fMRI results are not too surprising as humans have a tremendous capacity to learn by watching and mimicking so it seems reasonable that this ability to somehow do a mental dry-run in the absence of physically or emotionally enacting it, serves our learning/doing cycles quite well.

But it leaves me wondering what are we doing to ourselves when we watch challenge videos? Or when we consume social media audio-visual content more generally for that matter? 

While I think that Lefie’s premise (that we can train for change) is basically sound, what are we planning on doing with that knowledge now we have consumed her video?

In Part Two we will look at how to remediate the seeing-is-doing trap and begin the steps you may take to learn about your own terroir (self ecosystem).