A lot of the very important G20 record is on YouTube or Twitter. The problem with this is it's more difficult to read. This is an issue because it's most important to get this information to the people who don't want to invest the time in reading it.
For example, I think everyone should read Steve Paikin's tweets from last night, starting from "leaving the media ctr. heading for the scene of the rioting. want to see for myself." He walked around the city and live-tweeted what he saw in real time. But currently the only way to read these tweets is to go to his twitter feed, click the "More" button currently seven times (it's going to increase as he keeps tweeting), find the first tweet in the series, and read through by counterintuitively scrolling up.
There are also youtubes that allegedly show the use of agents provocateurs. I say "allegedly" because I haven't watched them yet. Why not? Because youtubes are inconvenient. You have to watch the whole thing, you don't know when the interesting and relevant stuff is going to happen, you don't know if you even care about the contents.
I could read a transcript of a youtube much faster than I could watch a youtube, and I could read a chronological transcript of a twitter feed much more easily than I could read an actual twitter feed.
They need to invent a way to do this, either automatically for everything that's posted, or by sending the material through some website that automatically transcribes it.
I find it inconvenient and burdensome to keep up on everything I should to be fully informed (I know, I know, #FirstWorldProblems), and I actually do feel morally obligated to intake all available information. It's even more important to get this information into the minds of people who refuse to believe that the situation could be more nuanced than they originally thought, and they're certainly not going to want to go to the effort of watching youtubes and reading twitter feeds that they don't care about!
3 comments:
I'm with you on this - I find informing myself via video inconvenient and time-consuming. But I think we are in the minority. When I send or recommend YouTubes, I get a greater response than when I send or recommend articles. People tell me they have no time to read and way too much reading material, but if someone sends them a video, they will watch it.
Your thoughts?
I have no idea. I can read faster than I can watch videos, and I find reading more multi-taskable and portable.
I think it also hinders the sharing of information. If I read something once and want to link to it in a blog post later, it's usually easy to find with the power of google plus what I remember about the article. But if it's a video, the key words on the youtube page might not be the same as the key words I remember.
Clearly, thanks for the help in this question.
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