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]

With you up to the last clause, but I think the web is “about” whatever people choose to use it for.

[gerald_duck]

Hmm. You say "a bad thing to happen to the web", whereas I say "not what the web's about". I suspect we mean fairly similar things?

If video takes over the web, and most people start using it for that, will you go with the flow and start watching video, hunt and peck for textual stuff or give up entirely? Will you keep trying to persuade the majority that it's wrong?

Personally, I don't even have any tools for viewing video or Flash installed on this PC. There are no drivers for the sound card, and nothing connected to its output. I intend to keep reading text for as long as I can, and will keep trying to persuade others.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I think they are different questions, like the difference between a language and what people say in it.

[gerald_duck]

As an adherent of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, I don't believe the two are independent considerations.

Bored with the Internet is one of my favourite XKCD cartoons, and having a camera in my pocket alters my perception of things I do and places I visit (possibly negatively, so I prefer to leave it in the car).

[ewx.livejournal.com]

When someone writes Mein Kampf in German, I don't object that that antisemitism is not what German is about - it would be equally objectionable whatever language it was written in. German is just a platform for communication. But if you were e.g. constructing some kind of survey of important German writings you might have well have cause to complain that it was one of the less pleasant books in that language and you'd rather have avoided it.

Similarly the profusion of video is objectionable not because it's violating some abstract principle about the web, but for practical reasons that apply however it reaches me. And a lot of it reaches me because it's because widespread online.

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

"If video takes over the web, and most people start using it for that, will you go with the flow and start watching video, hunt and peck for textual stuff or give up entirely? Will you keep trying to persuade the majority that it's wrong?"

Regarding video as morally wrong is insane. It's not as if there is a finite amount of web and the video is crowding out the text. What you get is a contour defined by convenience, both of the sender and the reciever. This is why lots of talks get published as video: the alternative is usually not a text transcript, it's them not bothering to publish it.

I don't usually bother with video myself, especially not at work.

I think what we're seeing is a bit like the rash of "FMV games" in the nineties as that technology became possible. People using it because it's new. It'll never achieve even 90% takeup, and after it's less new people will go back to using it where it fits the convenience supply/demand curve. Consider mobile phones: video is possible, audio is the default, but people *still* use text - because sometimes it's more convenient.