Turkey frying videos vs. opinion essays

Turkey frying videos vs. opinion essays

Posted on January 17th, 2020 by Scott Warnock

I don’t know what you did over the holidays, but I went out and became an international TikTok sensation. Kind of.

It went like this: A few months ago, I made a very short video for my boys spoofing the amazing YouTuber CrazyRussianHacker. The video was just my reminder to them that they were going to chop some wood with me that day, but they thought it was, as kids these days say, “awesome,” and they said I should “make a TikTok,” whatever that was. Why not?

Just like that, I was a TikTokker! A few people even looked at the video.

Several weeks later it was Thanksgiving, and as I was preparing, for the 18th year in a row, to fry our turkey, my kids, nieces, and wife followed me out to the garage and decided this event would make for a good second piece of TikTok content. The result was a silly 33-second video. In it, I give a few frying metrics and drop the turkey in. Not much to it, although there is a funny moment when I tell the dog to “get outta here” as her little snout appears in the corner of the screen to sniff the turkey.

We all had a chuckle, and then I stood out in the cold while they posted the video and laid around on couches like a bunch of lizards looking at their phones.

Before the turkey was even finished, one brave member of the group ventured outside, and I was told “Dad/Uncle Scott, you have 500 views!” I asked, “Is that good?” I was assured it was. As dinner approached, I was informed the views were up to 1,000. Later that evening, the number was 10,000. “You’ve gone viral!” I was told as the number crept toward 100,000. Some friends even called to tell me their kids had seen a weird video of me.

This has continued over the past six weeks, and now I am (almost) famous: nearly 355,00 views! For a few November moments, I was one of the most popular things on the web.

Around the same time, I wrote “So you want to leave New Jersey…,” the piece about people who want to leave New Jersey that I posted in this space a few weeks back, and it was also published as an op-ed in The Burlington County Times. As I do with any piece of writing, I sweated through the writing process before I got this article together and sent, writing and reading through multiple drafts and cuts.

I don’t have the metrics for the BCT piece, but I can sure as heck tell you that my publication there, posting on Facebook and Twitter, and posting here came up way short of 355,000. Way short.

This little unintentional comparison again made stark something we all know. In the competition of I-work-hard-to-write-something vs. recording-of-shabbily-dressed-me-dropping-turkey-into-fryer-with-giggling-family-members-and-curious-dog-nearby, turkey video wins every time.

In fact, that turkey video is still flying, while the article is withering away. No contest.

TikTok may be a privacy nightmare, but that’s not stopping it: Big things are happening for TikTok next year.

Maybe I need to spruce up my wardrobe and focus all my energy on the world of 30-second videos.

No, I’m not tucking my keyboard in a drawer just yet, but I do concede: It’s TikTok’s world. We’re just (trying) to live–and write–in it.

Author Bio
Latest Posts

Scott Warnock

Scott Warnock is a writer and teacher who lives in South Jersey. He is a professor of English at Drexel University, where he is also the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education in the College of Arts and Sciences. Father of three and husband of one, Scott is president of a local high school education foundation and spent many years coaching youth sports.