Online video

[ewx]

I think the spread of online video is one of the worst things to happen to the web for some time.

There's certainly some good stuff out there, and spending the occasional hour poking around Youtube can be amusing, and there are things that just don't make sense in any other medium; but an awful lot of content seems to have migrated into video where previously the same material would have been online in text form - you don't get the notes of someone's presentation online, you just get the video.

To my mind the three biggest disadvantages of video over an article, or a transcript, or even just a decent set of slides, are:

• They dictate pacing. You can read at any pace you like, with a video you're stuck with the pacing its creator chose, and at least for me inevitably limited to a rather slower pace than I can read at. This isn't just about normal reading speed, you can skim text in a way that's rather difficult with a video.
• They have sound. A nuisance in a shared environment or if you wanted to do something else with your ears (listen to background music or for a knock at the door, for instance).
• Interruption is costly. If something interrupts reading text you can 'passively' stop, and when you return to it you can just scan back up a bit for enough context to get going again. If something interrupts watching a video you have to actively find the pause button, and if you wanted to pick up context when returning to it you have to fiddle with the rewind controls (which might well be a not-big-enough slider, but that's an implementation detail).

You can't print them out either, but I almost never print anything out to read it, so that one's pretty much moot from my point of view.

Comments

[ewx.livejournal.com]

That seems like a fundamentally anti-intellectual position (on his part); if an important argument cannot stand on its own, then it ought to fall, rather than survive on cosmetic details.

[atreic.livejournal.com]

Hemm maybe he didn't go quite as far as I am claiming (http://robhu.livejournal.com/637968.html), he just says 'there is value in body language and tone that alters the content of just the text.' Maybe it was my annoyance at videos jumping to fill in the gaps.

[sparrowsion]

There's also negative value in having the pedagogical and presentational skills of a decomposing sloth when you're clogging YouTube up with your "tutorial"1. Insisting on text, or even slides, increases the chances of getting a competent rendering.

1 This micro-rantulette brough to you courtesy of 1ngi's attempts to find an introduction to iMovie 06.

[simont]

That certainly seems like a much more reasonable claim. In particular, tone of voice can often disambiguate possible interpretations of a sentence which might be hard to choose between given just the words in text. Irony and sarcasm are one obvious such area, but there are more subtle cases too, such as emphasis – a de-emphasis of some particular word might indicate that it was intended as an illustrative example of the main assertion and not a constraint on its applicability.

Of course you can re-word to compensate for things like that, if you're trying to produce an equivalent piece of text, but it might come over very badly in a literal transcript.