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Subject: Videos vs Text Webpages
You may have read an old rant of mine, Why I Hate YouTube, but if not you might be surprised to find I really don't like youtube. In fact, I don't like any internet video, the stuff drives me crazy. Recently over on Robert Scoble's blog he brought the topic up. He's one of the 'blogging elite' (which I grant doesn't mean much) and he interviews interesting people with his video camera and posts them for all to see. No doubt these people have interesting things to say.
But I'll never know.
I hate internet video, and the comments on the blog thread above tend to agree not only with my position, but my reasoning as well. If I may:
toivo skirts around one issue. Paraphrased: without adequate text, how do you know if the video's worth watching? Sure, you know who's in it, but if I'm gonna watch a 7-minute video I want to know that the whole 7 mins is worth my time.
I'm a voracious info junkie. I want to stuff my brain full of interesting things, at high speed, all the time. Video forces me to slow down, to inhale the info at a measured pace that was probably created for the lowest common denominator (if the pace was even considered by the creator, which is all too unlikely).
Aaron says "I rarely have several minutes of undivided attention to give over to a video. Text allows me to rapidly triage information..." That's a key issue for me. I don't read a massive block of text unless it's fascinating. I skim, I glance, I flick. I can't do that with video, there's no overview.
Scott says Watching a video takes more effort [...] because I have to physically stop and concentrate on the content–taking time out from other activities..." I don't do one thing at a time. I do five. Watching a video means I have to stop reading, stop paying attention to chats, and stop listening to music. It means I have to assault everyone else in my space (the office, the living room) with the video's audio, and if the video turns out to suck? Everyone thinks I'm watching stupid shit, when I simply could not know in advance what I was about to view.
Video is rude, it's the pop-up ad of the 'blogosphere', it forces me to devote my time to something that, more often than not, turns out to be complete shit.
But I'll never know.
I hate internet video, and the comments on the blog thread above tend to agree not only with my position, but my reasoning as well. If I may:
toivo skirts around one issue. Paraphrased: without adequate text, how do you know if the video's worth watching? Sure, you know who's in it, but if I'm gonna watch a 7-minute video I want to know that the whole 7 mins is worth my time.
I'm a voracious info junkie. I want to stuff my brain full of interesting things, at high speed, all the time. Video forces me to slow down, to inhale the info at a measured pace that was probably created for the lowest common denominator (if the pace was even considered by the creator, which is all too unlikely).
Aaron says "I rarely have several minutes of undivided attention to give over to a video. Text allows me to rapidly triage information..." That's a key issue for me. I don't read a massive block of text unless it's fascinating. I skim, I glance, I flick. I can't do that with video, there's no overview.
Scott says Watching a video takes more effort [...] because I have to physically stop and concentrate on the content–taking time out from other activities..." I don't do one thing at a time. I do five. Watching a video means I have to stop reading, stop paying attention to chats, and stop listening to music. It means I have to assault everyone else in my space (the office, the living room) with the video's audio, and if the video turns out to suck? Everyone thinks I'm watching stupid shit, when I simply could not know in advance what I was about to view.
Video is rude, it's the pop-up ad of the 'blogosphere', it forces me to devote my time to something that, more often than not, turns out to be complete shit.
![[Image: http://nfggames.com/system/arcade/special.php/b-d/bp-5/y-kof97/z-10/x-What?/.png]](http://nfggames.com/system/arcade/special.php/b-d/bp-5/y-kof97/z-10/x-What?/.png "http://nfggames.com/system/arcade/special.php/b-d/bp-5/y-kof97/z-10/x-What?/.png")
This post was edited on 2009-01-14, 09:32 by