One thing in life I particularly enjoy is sharing entertainment with my friends and family. The sparkle in my roommate’s eyes when I show them a sweet new song or an awesome movie always does me good. But for years, I’ve gotten a certain kind of kick out of exposing people to a hidden gem deep within the annals of YouTube. When I first discovered this treasure it was sheer accident, but now I am one of the many who are fascinated yet disgusted by the infamous YouTube star: Shoenice.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the sensation, Shoenice, born Chris Schewe, is a man who was able to reach internet stardom by filming himself consuming just about anything, and I mean anything. Throughout my life I’ve been witness to plenty of my peers eating or drinking some gross concoction on a dare, but those were reduced to mere child’s play after I watched a Shoenice video.

From entire bottles of hard alcohol, hot sauce and glue, the guy consumes just about anything. Even things you didn’t think were possible to eat. I’ve seen a video where he eats an entire tin of chewing tobacco which still makes me cringe just thinking about it.

His steel intestine isn’t what makes Schewe so intriguing to me. Recently, I’ve found it takes a lot to impress me and I don’t believe that trait is unique to me. While Schewe’s obscure talent is bizarre, his use of shock value is not different from other viral internet sensations. In fact, for anything to be relevant or exciting in the technology age, it better be off-the-wall.

The whole reason I even care to tell people about Schewe is because what he does is so genuinely unbelievable. Every day, as I go through social media, I’m bombarded with videos, links, and articles imploring me to “click on this” claiming “you’ll never guess what this man does at McDonald’s” or “this bride surprised her man with a gift you won’t believe.”

The whole appeal to links such as those is the promise of surprise.

People crave excitement and now that we have nearly instant access to videos of people backflipping off cliffs, falling from space and making insanely long trick shots, we grow tired of the same-old same-old. Sensations of the day quickly get cast deep into the internet’s peripheral.

The hunger for the new and exciting isn’t a bad thing though. It’s only natural for humans to want more and to continue to trudge through new frontiers, even if those frontiers involve eating cactuses on Youtube. Internet pioneers like Shoenice, as strange as it may be to say, are the new artists of the technology age.

Sites like YouTube give people the ability to have a better view of the world around them. It gives people the ability to make use of seemingly unusual abilities and dares us to do better and to share what we can do.

While it will be hard to beat a Shoenice video, I’m excited to stumble upon the next Internet star who’s videos I can’t help but share.