talkmagic.co.uk

YouTube exposure is wrong (I know there is a youtube thread elsewhere but I want to raise a particular point with this thread) but In some instances, such as pub card tricks, then a certain amount of exposure can be considered okish although not necessarily ethical, however, in this day and age where youngsters are more reliant on viewable medias than printed medias we cannot say that this method of introducing magic to them cannot have it's benefits.

This of course is a very touchy and sensitive issue that not only relates to our sworn code of conduct but also the very ethics upon which our artform is based.

We swear secrecy and never to reveal our secrets yet without this ethical code being broken none of us would know half the magic we know now!! Let's face it, many of the tricks you first learnt are what I would call "pub car tricks", simple, catchy, effective tricks that were invented by some one once and since then have been passed on from person to person through the generations either by printed or one to one methods.

But these come from eras when the printed medium and word of mouth/one to one were the most prevalent forms of communication!

Today we have moved on super fast technologically and communicatively. from snail mail to email, from 3 channels on tv to 100's, from only video tape to dvd, blu ray, hd dvd and downloads!! The list goes on.

As new technology increases so does the youngs attention to the older formats decrease making such things as reading books boring or unfashionable. So ethically we're left with a dilemma of sorts. How do we best utilise new technology to maintain an interest in an ancient art??

We learnt our secrets from being told stuff as much as from the format of our days - books! Today a trainee magi is blessed with downloads, dvds, vhs's, video demos and all sorts!! Pc's are the medium of choice for many so my question to spark debate is this.....

If we were given information on BASIC (my so called pub card tricks etc) magic that many poeple know on a word of mouth basis: ie, your dad taught you what his dad taught him and so on...... Is it completely wrong for those same basic trciks - which are openly available in the public domain anyaway - to be "exposed" on youtube sites?? NB: I do not mean bigger effects or effects developed by hard working magi's, I only mean those we could consider commonplace. Also, I do not agree with the exposure of most magic but we all have to learn something that sparks an interest and confidence of ability. Where do we draw that line of what is ethically right to expose for the good of the art and what isn't?

***ducks and runs for cover as this could be explosive!!***

my brother taught me my first card trick when i was about seven years old... a deck is shuffled, in front of the spec, then the cards are cut, by the spec, in to four piles. then the spec it told to move 'THAT card to THAT pile' several times and finally, he/she is asked to turn the top cards over, to find that they are all aces. Such a simple little card trick, where the magician hardly touches the deck. it was this trick that started my interest in magic, and after a while i started performing it myself.(my bro is not into magic, and i have no idea where was taught the trick from...)


HOWEVER. i will never go and hunt down the person that invented the trick and thrust money in their hand. as far as I am concerned, it is something that my brother passed on to me. (slay me if you want, but i stand by it).

i buy magic now, because, in my opinion, the tricks i buy, are a product... and in my mind, you shouldnt steal a trick in that sense, ie, im not going to scout YouTube to find vids of 14 yr old American's telling me how to do a trick. I do think some tricks and gimmicks are seriously over priced, I KNOW people put time and effort, AND money into 'inventing' a trick, but seriously, some gimmicked decks are £40+ they dont cost that much to make, and if the inventor really wanted to make money, he should make more, sell them for less... I only say this because in the past three months, I have spent in excess of £250 just on magic tricks. And i only do magic for my own amusement, i dont get paid to do it, and quite frankly, im not going to make an attempt at making a career out it.

just a question, have you ever had someone come up to you and say 'I know how thats done' I have, and i simply replied 'that makes two of us'


I personally think that some magicians should get the thought 'the general public are conspiring to expose our secret' well out of their heads. they're not. there's just an unfortunately large handful of people that dont follow the rules. i also think that the sooner we face the facts that this can no longer be helped, the better, we can get on with our lives, and learn new trick, or practice.


now ILL duck and cover...


my 2p

sorry- 'so to summarize' YES i think its wrong, but it CANT be stopped. if it does stop, ill eat my broken PK sharpie

... but where do you draw the line? it's not about if it can be stoppd or not, it's where does the line between teaching and exposing get blurred in the context of todays technology and communication formats?

hmmm...im not one to swap tricks, or give/load tutorial, unless it was a routine that i could genuinely say I created... however, if i met a fellow magician, and we agreed to help each other with handling techniques. i would be more than up for that, as i find the best way for me to learn something is to see it live. i have SO many books on card magic, and handling, yet I STILL cant do something as simple as a pressure fan! (hopefully, one day ill meet someone to teach me, and in return, i could perhaps show him a revelation method)

realistically, revealing 'tricks' should be broken down ito what IS acceptable to show, and what IS NOT.

things like Flourishes, And Shuffles shouldn't be a secret amongst magicians, thats all showmanship

basics like forcing, I honestly don't think should have to be paid for separately, why shouldn't we show other magicians different methods of forcing?

things like gimmicked decks shouldn't be revealed, as they are a 'product'

fair play for the people that have put time and effort into illusions and tricks, but our we not all striving to do the same thing? entertain people?

I cant remember who it was that said about peoples earnings, but what if, the next great card conjurer was financially challenged? yet he/she could access instructional vids for free, and they practiced and practiced?


i honestly doubt we will change anything, no matter HOW much we debate what is right and wrong...

well, I often reveal tricks to my family, friends e.t.c (sorry in advance), but would never consider publishing them and giving them away, or creating tutorial videos and the like.
I have to say that I am not exactly the typical teenager when it comes to such things as printable media vs. viewable media, I would far prefer to read a book than watch eastenders, for example. Although downloadable media avaliable from the net is needed somewhat for the survival of our art, it would certainly be possible without those forms of media, but certainly there would be less 'wannabe David Blaines' who have learnt a god-awful and inneffective sleight from a 14 year old with nothing better to do with his life than teach others to follow his dire ways. But is that such a bad thing?

I am personally not against exposure on a basic level, such as the revealing of a simple key card effect, but when it becomes the exposure of someone's intellectual property, that's where it crosses the line, for me anyway.

Let us look at a fictional example: A 12 year old boy is surfing the net and sees a video labeled: 'da worldz most amazin card trik xplained'. The video teaches him a simple card vanish(ungimmicked) which he then practices for little or no time before going and showing his friends, who laugh at his pathetic performance and mock him for not being able to fool them for the rest of the day. This is exposure on the most basic level, but on a mass-scale. It will almost definitely have no effect on the fraternity's wellbeing, but might annoy a card conjourer who used to use it in his repitoire.
This could be considered a commonplace effect and is openly avaliable in the public-domain anyway, but does the fact that it is being shown on a mass scale (say to 4000 viewers on 'youtube'), really make it 'bad exposure'?

I must admit that I was tempted to start again with the above example for a second time, but then say ' the boy goes and practices for hours, amazes his mates, buys RRTCM and eventually becomes a famous magician', but I shall simply discuss the idea; '(but) we all have to learn something that sparks an interest and confidence of ability' instead.
Well, I suppose that we do all need to start somewhere, and one cannot expect every obsessive teenage boy who has a fleeting interest in magic to spend £10 on a book of tricks, but does that make small amounts of exposure necessary? I don't know, but it's certainly a valid point

Jordan C writes 'How do we best utilise new technology to maintain an interest in an ancient art?? '

Of course the cheapscate but all to common answer to this is 'make an e-book/electronic download' but I don't think that it will be effective in the long run. People seem to get annoyed about buying a series of 0's and 1's for an unholy ammount of money and frankly I can see why.

And so the question really is this: can we afford to lose a few of our closely guarded secrets to mainstream knowledge, for the sake of retaining the younger generation's interest in out art? I know what I think.

Tough call...bit of a hot potatoe subject...however my 2p is as follows.

I appreciate we have to keep up interest in the art. If people want ebooks why not ebook the classics? If people want DVD's let them come, that's fine, where's the difference of someone purchasing an ebook of a classic text and one that purchases the standard printed copy! I can't see any.

But we're talking here of exposure of another form, from what I've read here on TM some of it's passable some of it's not...none of it's good enough...(I'll wait to be corrected)...to get the point of the sleight/effect whatever across. This, to me, would mean that as stated in a previous post the person in question could get the slight/effect up to the same standard as youtube (as an example) then try it out on some friends, get ribbed cos it didn't fool anyone...that possible initial spark could be gone...in that one performance. I endeavour to keep a whole new generation interested in whatever way possible (performing, talking about magic etc.). However I believe there should still be some work involved in finding out what is needed to become a good magician, cardician etc.


As an aside...ebook of the classics...I've been unfortunate enough to source some stuff on ebook (work related not magic) as it was the only format available...what did I do with it when I got the download...printed the bleedin' thing out! What I would say about ebooks is that to me the whole ebook thing lends itself to easily currently to a breach of copyright law. It's easy enough to distribute an ebook, ok I guess it's easy enough to get a standard printed text into a computer and then distribute it...but with ebooks the work is done, it just needs distributing across t'internet!

To conclude...in my opinion I've got no qualms with stuff being posted, what I don't like is sloppy stuff being posted, which then transcends down the line to potential magi either putting them off, or just teaching basic skills badly...which cannot be seen as good for the art from whatever angle we look at it.

The way I see it, most people getting into magic start at some exposure. When I started, the exposure was my friend doing the back palm production. I was floored. Astonished. He showed me how it was done, and from then on I was falling down the slippery slope. It was harmless to know. It was just us 2 who used it in school. We did simple stuff for half a year- until we graduated 8th grade. After high school started though, he got busy and stopped. We used to share all the stuff we baught. I see no harm in this.

But with youtube exposure, it's different. It's impersonal, egotistical, and sometimes, even useless. The teachers are usually kids who are mediocre to bad at what they try to do. Their lack of ability and need for recognition seems to be what makes them expose. The worst of them gauge their success by the amount of subscribers they get.
The teaching is even worse. Many of the exposers talk down to the video camera (ultimately the viewers). To them, being a teacher makes up for their lack of ability.

My friend, who I mentioned earlier, did the backpalm very well. His setup was slow, but the card was invisible to me.

Just my ten cents.

Alot of the youtube exposers remind me of that guy from the South Park episode, the World of Warcraft one. With the guy who ''Has absolutley no life!!''..

If you've seen it you'll know what I mean.

The problem is not just the exposure, the point is if they see a magician doing a poor quality move, it makes all magicians look lazy. And then alot of people will be slagging off magicians in general.

This would seem to be an unneccesary parallel thread, as almost exactly the same is being said here:

http://www.talkmagic.co.uk/ftopic16175.php&highlight=

I had actually hoped to induce new thoughts but polarised views have brought this back to the same old thing I agree.

If we were given information on BASIC (my so called pub card tricks etc) magic that many poeple know on a word of mouth basis: ie, your dad taught you what his dad taught him and so on...... Is it completely wrong for those same basic trciks - which are openly available in the public domain anyaway - to be "exposed" on youtube sites?? NB: I do not mean bigger effects or effects developed by hard working magi's, I only mean those we could consider commonplace. Also, I do not agree with the exposure of most magic but we all have to learn something that sparks an interest and confidence of ability. Where do we draw that line of what is ethically right to expose for the good of the art and what isn't?

I know youtube is the most visible method of this but I meant in general....

But if it's going to descend into the same old argument and miss my point intended then I have no problems with the thread being closed.

In order to branch this thread from the other, here's my theory. If people cared enough, on mass, to know the method for magic tricks, then all of the technuque and trick DVDs would be downloadable on some bit torrent site.

Since they are not, we can assume that not many people care and no matter how many tricks are exposed on you tube, not many people are actually going to watch them. Some of the reveals I've seen have viewing figures in the thousands. That's so few people in the world; some of which may be magicians.

As I've said before, what are these people really going to do about it.

I think you could put the entire Lennart Green DVD set on youtube and no layman you encounter ever see it.

Youtube exposure is small fry. I've never met anyone who cares enough about magical secrets to get as far as mentioning to me that they are there, other than some magicians.

Marvell wrote:In order to branch this thread from the other, here's my theory. If people cared enough, on mass, to know the method for magic tricks, then all of the technuque and trick DVDs would be downloadable on some bit torrent site.

Sorry to burst your bubble but I can link you to 2 torrent sites that do exactley that, I can also tell you that the amount of people using them run into the 100's... no more that that tops and they are both on google!, and believe it or not the main topic of conversation in the forums of those sites is.... you guessed it "exposure".. ironic huh?

Wukfit wrote:Sorry to burst your bubble but I can link you to 2 torrent sites that do exactley that, I can also tell you that the amount of people using them run into the 100's... no more that that tops and they are both on google!, and believe it or not the main topic of conversation in the forums of those sites is.... you guessed it "exposure".. ironic huh?

My bubble is perfectly fine, thanks

Coo, hundreds of people round the world know our secrets. Eek!

Proves my point that people don't really care though.

Marvell wrote:
Proves my point that people don't really care though.

That was exactley my point... all this exposure fear is nonsense... the people who want to learn google the answers and find them in forums like that.. all 1000 maybe in total... so what?
I'm sure I can manage to find someone to perform to who dosn't frequent these places as can everybody else.

and as for youtube, unless your audience is 16 or under then I guess you have nothing to worry about.

Just to get my point into perspective, is there anybody here over the age of 25 who had even heard of youtube, let alone guessed it would have magic videos before you heard about it here?