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.
The film makes the case that pregnancy and adoption content does extremely well online, and though it doesn’t quite suggest that the Stauffers added Huxley to their family to drive engagement, it doesn’t not say that either. This, then, is the digital hornets’ nest Mason’s documentary probes, revisiting the timeline between the beginning of Myka Stauffer’s YouTube career and the deactivation of the family’s channel (with its 700,000 subscribers) in 2020.
Admittedly, the film asks more questions than it answers: in episode one, text on the screen informs us that the Stauffers declined requests to be interviewed. And while this disappoints our endless appetite for both scandal and resolution – why did they “rehome” their son? What have their lives been like since? – a more interesting result by far emerges from the couple’s absence.
Traditional media always lags a bit behind the internet, which has become the locus of culture, but An Update on Our Family cleverly interrogates a part of existing online that affects everyone who does it. Without the Stauffers’ involvement, Mason must tell their extremely cautionary tale via interviews with other YouTube creators who engaged with their videos. In doing so, she digs into the concept of the digital parasocial relationship.
Everyone who uses social media has at least one. Whether it’s an old schoolmate whose Facebook family dramas you’ve become obsessed with or an Instagram influencer whose outfits you copy, there’s probably someone online you don’t really know, whose business you’re slightly too invested in (for me, it’s Big John, whose screenshotted Chinese takeaway orders – bosh! – stir in me a joy that is hard to articulate). It’s unavoidable: social media makes us think we know people that we’re actually just looking at through a screen.
YouTubers such as the Stauffers (and countless others like them) actively cultivate these parasocial bonds, and we see this here twofold. First, via footage of Myka showing, say, the mess in the back of her car or baby vomit on bedsheets – small, personal disclosures that might make someone watching feel as if she was a close friend. And second, through her former fans’ reactions: perky YouTuber Hannah Cho remembers fondly that Myka “never stopped sharing updates with us”, even at difficult moments such as a miscarriage (in footage of the Stauffers’ announcement of this news, Myka notes, “We haven’t been vlogging for about four hours because it’s been so emotional”).
In bringing this contemporary way of relating to the fore, Mason’s careful, well-observed documentary does more than lay out the shocking story of the Stauffers (which obviously also raises questions about the ethics of vlogging with children more widely). Instead of merely dealing in the sadness or salaciousness of these specific events, it feels like a more valuable comment on how we live now, and there is an ambient sadness to it – an indictment of the way things have gone.
We live in a society that is increasingly siloed and individualistic, so our human need for relation can manifest digitally – reliance on strangers in our phones for those of us who consume the content, and a constant need to fill the ever-growing attention well for those who make it. An Update on Our Family shows the damage this causes. The internet is a big, wonderful place a lot of the time, but Mason’s film is a reminder that the consequences of its constant drive for engagement, and its commandeering of human interaction , are very often starkly, heartbreakingly real.
