C’est fou combien ça provoque de la nostalgie, voir la gare d’Aigle (VS) pendant quelques secondes dans un « cabride » sur YouTube. J’ai passé peu de temps à Aigle, et c’était il y a 15 ans ; je ne connais pas du tout la ville et pourtant…

Bookmarking so I have enraging examples to show my students.

This morning, I’m reviewing a manuscript while watching a “cab ride” video on YouTube and thinking about how much calmer academic work is once final grades have been submitted.

I mean this as a general observation and not generational handwringing, but it’s amazing how many cues my students take from YouTubers when recording video presentations for my class.

Merci à YouTube de me permettre un petit voyage en tramway grenoblois ce matin.

Je trouve que Paris est surreprésenté dans les mondes francophones et francophiles, mais je me lasse pas quand-même des vidéos sur son métro.

During my two years living in France and Switzerland, I fell deeply in love with travel by rail. But alas, I live in a particularly rail-unfriendly region of a rather rail-unfriendly country. One of my guilty internet pleasures is consuming rail-related media so that I can feel like I’m having train experiences anyway. Geoff Marshall’s YouTube channel is a favorite of mine. Le Ferrovipathe and Urban Traveler are a couple of Francophone channels that I like much more, but that produce less content.

Ce matin, je prends un petit voyage ferroviare entre Bâle et Strasbourg grâce à YouTube.

Yesterday, two podcasts that I listened to while doing work around the house lined up in such a perfect way that I wanted to write down my memory of the moment. First, because I was recently reminded of the fantastic podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text (which applies sacred reading techniques to the Harry Potter series, treating it as serious and meaningful without letting it—or its author—off the hook for being problematic), I’ve been trying to catch up with its second runthrough of the book series, in the perhaps-vain hope that I can start listening to episodes as they come out.

See, this is censorship.

Ça fait quelques années que mon frère regarde la chaîne YouTube Not Just Bikes, qui parle des vélos, des transports publics, et de l’infrastructure qui les soutient (où pas). Il m’en parle assez souvent, mais ce n’est que récemment que j’ai enfin décidé de regarder quelques vidéos. Vu mon amour pour les sujets abordés dans les vidéos (les vélos, les transports publics, l’Europe), ça m’étonne que je n’ai pas découvert cette chaîne avant.

Grâce à YouTube, j’ai appris au sujet des « speakerines » aujourd’hui. J’étudie le français depuis vingt ans, et il reste des tas de choses à apprendre.

On one hand, I am worried about the platformed internet. On the other, I realize that the phenomenon of “in cab” train videos probably wouldn’t exist without a centralized, problematic behemoth like YouTube, and that would make me sad.

YouTube is a great way to talk about personalization algorithms. On one hand, it’s quite good at what it does. On the other, that often leads to my watching more YouTube than I meant to, and I resent it for that.

A lot of people are ragging on YouTube these days, so I’d just like to mention one thing it does really well: Consistently pick the least-flattering frames of my class videos for the thumbnail options.