If any further proof were required that the world of social media is, like a runaway train, gathering speed before going completely off the rails, consider the case of Logan Alexander Paul.
And if there is a lesson for our kids to learn from the Logan Paul saga, it is not about unfettered social media but about the shifting boundaries of media acceptability and the fleeting and fickle nature of fame.
Paul skyrocketed to fame as a member on the Internet video sharing service Vine.
In February 2014, Paul had about 3.1 million followers on various social media platforms. By April 2014, he had attained 105,000 Twitter followers, 361,000 Instagram followers, 31,000 likes on his Facebook page and about 150,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel.
In 2015, he was ranked as the 10th most influential figure on Vine, with his six-second videos about nothing in particular — waking up, greeting his parrot and dog, mundane stuff — but it somehow brought him hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising revenue.
By October 2015, his Facebook videos alone had more than 300 million views.
To give Paul credit, he is no couch-potato video-game dummy. He was an all-star high-school football player and wrestler, and was on his way to majoring at Ohio State in industrial engineering when he saw the potential of social media and dropped out in 2014 to pursue a full-time career as a social-media entertainer.
As of Dec. 28, 2017, his video blog of his daily doings was credited with having something like 19 million subscribers.
He had, as they say, become famous for being famous.
For an advertiser seeking entry into the youth market this was a dream come true, and Paul reaped the benefit.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Paul, at 22 years of age, just paid $6.55 million for a 9,000-square-foot house in Encino’s sought-after Rancho Estates neighbourhood.
Good luck to Paul, I say, but for us educators, his story creates something of a problem as we try to steer kids toward the benefits of continuing their education beyond high school, whether it be into the trades, college courses or university degrees.
Part of the problem is that what we adults thought we understood to be a career-employment economy has been turned on its ear.
YouTube, as one example, has created its own economy, which is potentially invincible to any outside influence from parents, teachers, or adult judgment and influence of any kind.
But there’s a catch, and Paul’s star has dimmed recently since he backed himself into a spot of bother by posting a video of himself at Aokigahara, a forest in Japan known for suicides. Titled: “We found a dead body in the Japanese Suicide Forest,” the YouTube post had a thumbnail image of Paul standing in front of a blurred-out body.
Perhaps being 22 years old and disgracefully wealthy, Paul lacked the opportunity to form the kind of adult judgment that would anticipate the predictable outrage.
YouTube, it turns out has a “three strikes” policy that can result in a creator’s account being deleted if they repeatedly violate its rules. Until recently, however, the company has had less to say about videos that people simply find offensive or tasteless.
Paul doesn’t deserve to be kicked off the platform — at least not yet, according to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki.
Wojcicki’s comments reflect the increasing pressure YouTube has faced to remove offensive videos from the platform. Unilever, a major advertiser of consumer products, has threatened to abandon “toxic” platforms, saying it would avoid places that “do not make a positive contribution to society.”
Now entire websites are devoted to how to submit your video, among the tens of thousands of others, to YouTube: The best time of day, the best day of the week, the category most likely to go viral, the best keywords.
Let us hope it’s not too late in the day nor too pious or censorious to suggest that Paul’s fame, even his tenuous success, exists in a world of virtual reality and not because of any inherent value at all in the content he posts.
Or maybe in a new era when social media is like that runaway train, we can either express dismay about Logan Paul or learn from him how to think about where social media might be leading our kids.
Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools.
