Everywhere you look on the internet, people are doing things for attention that most of us might reasonably term “buck wild”. There are people eating the entire McDonald’s menu in one sitting, people willingly uploading slickly edited videos of childbirth (“My Labour Journey PART ONE OF SEVEN”), people making TikToks at funerals. All of life is in your phone – even, and in fact especially, the bits we used to keep to ourselves.
This online attention economy sets the scene for An Update on Our Family, director Rachel Mason’s HBO documentary (Thursday 30 January, 9pm, Sky Documentaries), which centres on former YouTubers James and Myka Stauffer. The Stauffers were “family vloggers” – that is, they filmed and posted the minutiae of their lives with their children, from cleaning the car to newborn reveals. In May 2020, the couple shared a video reporting that they had “rehomed” Huxley, the son they had adopted from China three years previously, and who is autistic. Outrage, of course, ensued, as other creators on the platform mobilised to rage against the decision, which became the subject of wider online discourse for weeks.
