What the Twitch Bob Ross Marathon says about Internet Culture

           Twitch.tv: The world's largest video game steaming website, with millions of user watching thousands of streamers at any given moment. Bob Ross: a painter who had a 31 season, 403 episode painting show on PBS in the 80s/90s. What possessed someone to combine the two is anyone's guess, but the idea caught on, and fast. After just a few hours, the stream had tens of thousands of viewers, and maintained a steady 50,000 or so viewers throughout the 9 day marathon. So, why was this so popular? My theory is that its popularity had nothing to do with the actual content of the stream.

           During the initial couple of hours of the stream, when it was first picking up steam, none of the mentions of it that I saw took the form of: Hey look! Bob Ross is on twitch! I love that show! Almost everyone who was linking to the stream was doing so to point out how dumb of an idea it was. The hordes of viewers weren't coming because they wanted to watch Bob Ross, they were coming because they wanted to laugh at the zany new thing that twitch was doing. People watch it not because they actually find it entertaining, but because they wanted to feel like they were in on the joke. The only problem is, there was no joke to begin with. It's only funny because everyone agrees that it should be.

         So, what can we learn from this effect? (besides the fact that twitch culture is dumb) I think that this phenomenon is a perfect example of Barry Schwartz's Paradox of Choice. In this talk, Schwartz presents the idea that having too many options makes people less capable of choosing the one that's best for them. This is because, after a certain point, choices start to blend together, making it difficult to keep track of why one  option is preferable to another. The internet takes this idea and turns it up to eleven. There's a vast amount of content available on the internet, millions of times more than any human being could feasibly consume in their lifetime. With so many forms of entertainment to choose from, it becomes hard to ever make a decision on what to watch. We've all had those moments where we're sitting at our computer, with the entire breadth of human knowledge and entertainment at our fingertips, yet still feeling bored because there's nothing to do.

         How does all this relate to Bob Ross? I would hazard a guess that if this twitch stream hadn't popped up, no one would go out of their way to watch his show. The only reason anyone was interested was because, in the vast sea of content that is the internet, someone had made their choice for them. That's why sites like twitch, Reddit, 4chan, and twitter are so popular: they allow users to get someone else to make the decision of what they should do in their free time for them. One could take this as a sign that our culture has become a bit too media saturated, especially since people are making millions of dollars telling other people what they should find entertaining. Maybe Reddit can tell us what we need to do about that.