AS SEEN ON TV! - Showing Our Stuff to the World

Our title is probably not familiar to you if you have been born within the last 30-years, or maybe even 40-years. Once upon a time, television was considered the peak of our industrial and technical prowess, and to be seen on black and white television was remarkable indeed. If you managed to get a coveted bleacher audience spot on a local kid's cartoon show, complete with it's own host like "Bozo The Clown" or "Ranger Andy," after the show, you'd be a very minor kid celebrity, getting free packs of candy cigarettes from your admirers at school and the playground. 

The same thing happened with other products advertised on "the tube" in the mid-20th Century...toys, games, clothing, kitchen appliances and so on bore the mark "AS SEEN ON TV!" and even if you had NEVER seen it on TV, it made a real impression on you...it had been scan-lines on a television screen and that made it famous, regardless of whether it worked as advertised, or worked at all. 

Today, we not only have ultra-high definition color TV on everything from our cellphones to a wall-sized screen at home, we all now have our own integrated, digital TV station and motion picture studio in our personal device software, a truly democratized entertainment system that ANYONE can take part in...creating prerecorded video programs or hand-held live-broadcast transmissions, better in quality than some multi-million dollar production companies of only a few years ago!

How does this tie in to metal detecting? Especially here in the United States? Probably one word; YouTube. Maybe two words; YouTube AND Facebook. Where once there were a few metal detecting video producers, and I admit I am still one of them, there are now literally thousands of detectorists showing their finds on their own channels and Facebook pages. I like watching some of them myself, as an interested hunter in my own right, and a lot of those channels have something to add to my knowledge of the hobby. But "promoting" the hobby is probably no longer necessary...any more than the last 100 fishermen surrounding the last shrinking pond on earth needs to be posting "the fun of fishing!" videos to promote fishing! 

My point is, with so many metal detecting enthusiasts posting so many videos of various hunts and digs while digging so many historic artifacts from the ground, this increasingly publicly visible activity has drawn the unwelcome attention of various groups and agencies interested in either curtailing, or eliminating our hobby, plus has them collectively seeking video proof of the metal detecting public's possible careless indifference in recovering and/or handling relics. I'm NOT saying anyone is purposely violating the law or being careless...far from it! But I am saying we are being watched, and at least one international organization, who would be more than happy to see metal detecting shown in the same light as a major criminal enterprise, has mentioned the hobby as a source of archaeological malfeasance, and referencing Social Media as the source!

On the darker side of this, I've seen the results of people who view social media metal detecting posts and videos, who have profit, not history, in mind, and are happy to locate, invade and tear up a featured site looking for possible coins, jewelry or artifacts in a one-time, devil-may-care escapade, thus leaving the site off-limits to the rest of us who practice the metal detecting code of ethics in the lurch.

Now, like I said earlier, many of the metal detecting social media posts and videos are well done and interesting. I know of several sites and YouTube video channels that I anxiously AWAIT new episodes or posts to see what my friends and other hunters have found in their area. What are the answers to this issue of us all occasionally baring our sometimes dirty laundry to everyone outside the hobby?

To me, an immediate improvement would be to refrain from verbally or visually identifying the area that is being detected! In the excitement of the hunt, I've heard a few video creators identify EXACTLY where they are, sometimes mentioning it again through several episodes of an entertaining and well done video of their hunt. That's like putting a billboard up on your site DIG HERE!

Another improvement would be to not show an out-of-hand recovery you are digging...yea, your gonna' cover it up later, but for now, it looks like a drag-line project...the anti-detecting community LOVES these images! I'd love to see your find, but, unless you are cutting a perfect plug on-camera, and replacing it seamlessly, try not to display it. I've done this myself countless times, finally realizing, although I've cleaned up my hole and put everything back the way I found it, it still looked like a small construction site on my video when I was recovering something fairly large.

Well enough complaining and the gnashing of teeth here. I hope you will take my thoughts in the manner in which I made them...just trying to keep us all off the endangered detectorists list for as long as possible and maybe beating the naysayers at their own game!

Cheers!