Week Nine, Thing 17 : YouTube

Bizarre Japanese Game Show: "Silent Library"



Anyone who thinks that U.S. or U.K. reality television is the last word in televised depravity needs to broaden their horizons, and consider the Japanese. Yes, our nation produced "Jackass." Japan, however, brings us "Silent Library." Here, six young men sit at a library table and subject each other to pain and humiliation, each "turn" consisting of the chance selection of one "player" to have indignities visited upon him by the others. Throughout their ordeals, they cannot speak above a whisper. I'm uncertain what happens if they break this rule, as the gleeful sadism was all conducted at a low decibal level, one quality that I simply cannot imagine being maintained on an American reality or gameshow set. I'd be curious to learn more about the show, as it touches upon aspects of that culture of which I am only dimly aware, but which I believe are rich in comparisons and contrasts to life in my country.

I spent a lot of time today trying to find a good YouTube video to post. Maybe I'm overly critical, but I found this to be an extremely difficult task. My first idea was to search for something that seems inherently interesting to me: time-lapse photography. I thought I should make my post library-related, so I entered "time-lapse library." Unfortunately, the several videos I viewed were poor-quality items. Good time-lapse video should condense large changes that occur over prolonged periods of time into brief visual "summaries," or perhaps give a sense of daily patterns of activity. The time-lapse video of library construction that I watched were badly made, such that the eye was drawn to nearby traffic and the changing cloud patterns, while the actual subject of the video, the construction of the library, was barely visible in shadow. Other time lapse videos I watched were similarly lacking. While one would hope that YouTubes' ranking of video by popularity would cause high quality video to rise to the top of search results, this does not seem to be the case when you search for specific subjects.

Oh, as to how I found "Silent Library" : I entered "library" into the search box, and looked at the autofill options, which included "library prank," and "library game." I was curious what a "library game" might be, and I believe that was the search term that led to dozens of "Silent Library" episodes. I had never heard of that show before, and am, if not exactly grateful to have discovered it, intriged as ever by the power of the internet to lead me to strange new worlds I had not previously imagined.