The slow loris temptation. (Monkey-see, monkey-don’t!)

Last Wednesday (while not looking for anything in particular), I stumbled onto a YouTube video showing a very cute animal eating a grape:

My immediate impulse was to want one of these cute animals, and I wondered how Coco would feel about having one join her family. The slow loris is at the lowest rung of the primate order. Would she regard it as friend or foe? Would it regard her as friend or foe? This was just a passing fancy, as I was not seriously contemplating purchasing or adopting a slow loris; I just found myself captivated with the idea and I fantasized.

Reading the animal’s wiki page, my thoughts soon shifted from wanting one into concern over the fate of these charming and very lovable little critters. All five species of them are endangered or vulnerable, and a primary reason is said to be unsustainable demand from the pet trade — which is said to be driven in part by “viral videos”:

…unsustainable demand from the exotic pet trade and traditional medicine has been the greatest cause for their decline. Deep-rooted beliefs about the supernatural powers of slow lorises, such as their purported ability to ward off evil spirits or cure wounds, have popularized their use in traditional medicine. Despite local laws prohibiting trade in slow lorises and slow loris products, as well as protection from international commercial trade under Appendix I, slow lorises are openly sold in animal markets in Southeast Asia and smuggled to other countries, such as Japan. They have also been popularized as pets in viral videos on YouTube. Slow lorises have their teeth cut or pulled out for the pet trade, and often die from infection, blood loss, poor handling, or poor nutrition.

OK, the video I found had over half a million hits, but there are others with millions of hits; one showing a slow loris clutching a parasol has drawn over 5 million. There are, of course, moralistic videos (like this ABC news clip) which warn people not to buy them because they are endangered, but they are not as popular. Fascinatingly, there is actually an organized campaign to ban cute slow loris videos.

Much as I sympathize with the plight of these animals and would never fuel the trade in them, I abhor the idea of censorship in any form.

A larger issue that fascinates me, though, is the “viral video” phenomenon itself. What light might it shed on the nature of the human animal? How well do we understand it? Might it be changing the way we perceive things?

From the Wiki entry on viral videos:

The behaviors behind viral videos, where ideas and news spread between individuals through dialogue, have been present in society since prehistoric times and form part of the foundation of culture.^{[citation needed]} These behaviours are studied by the sociological fields of memetics and semiotics. Word of mouth marketing has long exploited the credibility of personal recommendations, and viral videos also benefit from this effect.

They can study it all they want, but the effect is not surprising if we consider the way the human mind works. People are fascinated by the new, the odd, the cute, the morbid, the cool, the offbeat, the outrageous. Things that are old, known, repeated, and overly familiar tend to bore, and thus it does not surprise me that homemade videos focusing on slow loris cuteness will far overshadow MSM-style videos showing scoldings from environmentalists or animal rights activists. This in turn can be depended on to create hostility between the two, competing camps.  Slow lorises waving parasols are cool; telling people not to have them is a downer, and boring. The environmentalists are the dull old squares for now.

Whether viral videos are changing the way humans think is debatable. It is just a new way to facilitate the endless, seemingly eternal human need for new things that are more interesting than the old.

In the old days (when I was a kid, long before YouTube and viral videos), the same effect could be produced by the plain old television set with its three channels (or four if you counted the then-dull “educational channel”). In particular, I remember a CBS documentary on “The Hippie Temptation.” Square, boring, middle-class Harry Reasoner simply walked around and talked to members of a then-small community of LSD-loving San Francisco artists and musicians. He and the CBS cameras went into the houses (“pads”) of these very strange people and talked to them intimately, thus bringing them into millions of middle-class homes all across America. Now, many respectable people would have been repelled, even disgusted or horrified. Some would have laughed out loud. Some (like the 13 year old me) would have thought they looked cool. I watched it and I was fascinated. Captivated even. Looking back, the featured story seems clearly intended to fascinate and titillate America’s middle class. Conspiracy theorists can speculate all they want, but I think it has to be recognized that the bottom line was pretty much the same then as it is now. To get network traffic. CBS wanted ratings. Today people want to get hits.

For different reasons (mainly nostalgia) that “Hippie Temptation” report is still popular, and ironically there are several YouTube versions floating around.

This is the full, hour-long program:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaczKrkfllE

And here’s a shorter, more popular version — the part featuring the Grateful Dead:

As regular readers know, I’m a longtime Deadhead. Was it because of a CBS video? In all honesty, I cannot say whether it was or not. When I really got hooked on them was when I listened to them in the right mindset and learned that their shows (this was in the late 60s and early 70s) were simply not ordinary rock and roll performances, but seemed to be possessed of or even driven by some strange and morbid sort of extraterrestrial energy that I cannot hope to explain even today. The Grateful Dead are still quite a viral presence, even with younger generations who never saw one of their actual concerts. So in that respect, they remain something that will always be new for those who have not yet experienced it.

Did YouTube make me want a slow loris? I don’t know. It didn’t make me buy one, and I don’t see how it could. I continue to like new things (my latest interest is welding), but they have to appeal to that elusive part of me that decides what to like, and what to not like. What I do and what I do not do are in no way YouTube’s responsibility. Anyway, I found myself simply loving slow lorises. Might that be called “The Slow Loris Temptation”? Maybe so, but I’m not buying one. Whether I would if I could be certain that they were being bred only in captivity on huge farms, were humanely treated, and that the breeding programs were helping the species recover their numbers, who knows?

Would it be my idea, though? Does that matter? Is everything we like or decide to do simply because we heard about it from someone else or saw someone else doing it? Why would some things go viral and others not? I’ve put a few things up on YouTube, not in order to get hits or draw traffic, but mainly to put out information I thought might be helpful. In one instance, I complained about a stupid “safe” mousetrap that failed to kill mice but instead tortured them, and to my astonishment it drew tens of thousands of hits. Another one I made for just one person, a friend who was having trouble with her stove, in the hope that I could show her how to fix it. Why these drew so much attention, I do not know, and as I’m not aspiring to YouTube stardom, I don’t especially care.

A lingering question, though, involves the human tendency to engage in monkey-see, monkey-do behavior, whether that is completely rational, whether that takes on a life of its own, whether some people are able to control it better than others, and how it might interplay with the minds of disturbed or mentally unstable people.

Back in the same era as the Hippie Temptation, there was a Malcolm McDowell film about a strict British prep school which culminated in a massive school shooting by maladjusted and disgruntled students (who had been brutalized by upperclassmen).

Naturally, it is on YouTube. This clip shows the grand finale, which is the Graduation Day shooting: