Filed under “Too many things considered” is the Sunday All Things Considered story on brothers John and Hank Green. These two snooze-inducers “realized their relationship had become nothing more than a series of text messages and e-mails” so “they began posting video blogs for each other on YouTube.”
What’s wrong with this story? Where do I begin:
The entire premise makes an enormous but common category error. NPR unthinkingly buys the dumb idea that exchanging recorded, non-interactive video clips is new and that its newness makes it uniquely qualified to help these text-message-addled brothers re-connect. Well, I have another technology they should learn about that’s even more amazing. It’s called the telemaphone machine, or something newfangled like that, and I hear tell that you can actually say something into it and have a person on the other end respond immediately! Then you talk again and then they do! Imagine the revolution we’ll now be able to have! No more of those awful, stilted, waaaaay too much information one-way YouTube video clips. Soon you’ll be able to actually ask the person you are talking to about the things you are interested in in the order you want to hear about them instead of having them describe their trip to the grocery store! And, no tedious, painstaking editing and uploading of video clips! You just talk! What a future!
[editor's note: I was way too harsh on the content of these guys' videos and their viewers based on my understanding of them from the story. After actually watching some of them I took out that paragraph.]
As a blogger I often get this creepy feeling that one day everyone will have a blog. They won’t have time to read anyone else’s, just narcissistically manage their own little garden of superficia and knit rhetorical cozies in which to store their quotidia.
This will make the blogosphere about as useful as a map of the United States that is EXACTLY THE SAME SIZE AS THE ACTUAL UNITED STATES.
1:1 Scale adds nothing and is really hard to fit in the glove compartment.
