So a while ago I made some threat that involved regaling you with some sort of theory about Youtube videos being embedded in blogs, and the fact that it BUGS THE HELL OUT OF ME even though I still love the people who do it because I am very much not a player hater.
That threat was made a week or a little more ago. The conversation it sprung from, which also involved Brian 1, occurred just a bit less than a month ago. The idea is finally coming to fruition now. Welcome to my mind, and to my “work” ethic.
The thing about blogs is, and you can argue with me on this one if you’d like because I know that there are valid arguments to be had here, I generally feel as if MOST READERS conceptualize them as text-based publications, descendents of things like zines, diaries, perhaps newspaper columns, maybe letters. Thus, when we access the blogs we read regularly, we’re prepared to use our print literacy to decode what we’re about to see. We’re expecting words, perhaps an image or two (hopefully of kittens), and probably some hyperlinks to deal with. Same goes for if we were opening up a zine, or turning to a newspaper column of someone we’ve gotten to know through regular reading.
While, yes, one beautiful thing about the web as a tool for disseminating information is that it’s always potentially a multimedia experience (and is therefore incredibly versatile), I feel like most of us at this point aren’t ready (and may never be ready?) for a medium that employs different literacies essentially at random2.
A related example is the embedding of music files into personal Myspace pages. The automatic play of songs on bands’ pages is annoying enough — it essentially dictates that if a user is browsing the web and s/he MAY come upon a band Myspace page s/he better not bother listening to music on her computer during that browsing experience, lest s/he come upon a page that’s going to blare another song on top of whatever’s already playing in Winamp or WMP or whatever.
Band pages are usually recognizable as such before the user navigates to them, though, so s/he can prepare by pausing Winamp when s/he knows s/he’s about to open a page that will almost definitely include sound. Music isn’t an integral part of personal Myspace pages as a rule, though, thus making it impossible to determine from page to page while surfing through profiles if one will play music or not. The rule then necessarily becomes: turn off YOUR music, in preparation for the possibility of having SOMEONE ELSE’S music foisted upon you. The surfer is forced to change HER environment in order to satisfy the whims of whoever is on the other end of that Myspace profile.
Back to embedded Youtubes, and, to be fair, Quicktime movies3 and whatever else falls into that category. While the case is slightly different with these as opposed to with embedded music files (most importantly in that these generally don’t play automatically), there are important similarities. When a blog that’s, say 90 percent text-based employs video files embedded into it occasionally, it forces on the reader a different sensory experience than s/he bargained for when coming to the blog.
If a blogger calls attention to a video file elsewhere on the web by describing it and providing a link, I generally find that I’m much more satisfied with the choice presented (based on that text description, from someone I ostensibly trust to some extent, do I or don’t I want to click on this link and watch this video?) If the video object is directly in front of me as part of the blog, I’m first forced to wait for it to load, then faced with the question of what the hell this object in front of me is, since it’s usually difficult to tell based on the first frame that’s facing me and/or the short or nonexistent description the blogger gave me (why should the blogger bother describing what’s already there, existing in the same window that the reader is already looking at?)
Television and movie audiences don’t want to have to read when they tune in, save for supplementary text on the screen or the occasional narrative bridge that comes up to tie things together. If they did, they’d be reading a book. Newspaper readers would be downright stymied if they had to watch films as part of their reading experience. Someone sitting down to look at a picture album wouldn’t want music to pop out of the album as part of the experience unless they were specifically expecting it. Or, for a less hypothetical example: no one REALLY likes those damn birthday cards that play songs when you open them up.
The major appeal of the embedded video or audio file in an otherwise print/visual text object seems to me to be similar to the appeal of those damn birthday cards: it’s neat, so people do it. The thing about the card is, another part of the appeal is that it’s surprising and kind of annoying, in a funny sort of way. I doubt most bloggers want their blogs to be surprising and kind of annoying, in a funny sort of way. Solution: stop that stuff! Just because you CAN do it doesn’t mean that you SHOULD.
As always, I welcome arguments wholeheartedly.
1. Tell him to update his godforsaken blog already.
2. I mean “at random” in the sense that one usually doesn’t know when first accessing a webpage if that page will require reading, or viewing, or listening, or some other sort of sensory digestion. More “traditional” media essentially always come with some set of assumptions about what sort of literacy is necessary in order to digest the content/message.
3. I noted this morning that going to a site with an embedded Quicktime movie crashed my browser last night while I was in the middle of a blog entry. This is another issue with these items being embedded that’s bothersome — most of us aren’t expecting when clicking on a blog, or even the index page of a website, to be faced with some sort of object that maybe our computer or browser can’t handle, or that will, er, clog the tubes of our internet for a time. What I really want to note here, though, is that as of this evening — not 24 hours after that experience — WordPress seems to have enabled an autosave feature in the post editor so that I don’t need to worry about constantly saving or risking a similar disaster of content loss. Hooray!
August 17, 2006 at 7:59 am
Interestingly enough, polls show that most bloggers–both readers & posters alike are in their late 30s-mid 40s–which puts them just about at the waning cusp of the generation that preceded the “MTV generation.” Not surprisingly, teens and adolescents (who are fluent in navigating multiple literacies simultaneously and don’t require an asynchronous “reorientation” to new presentations of information) are about 2.5 times more likely to use Youtube than anyone else.
Do I sense a generation gap? Do I sense that Andy was born about 20-some-odd years too late? Hee hee.
August 17, 2006 at 1:22 pm
duder - fourfour.typepad.com is the most artful combination of text, audio, video and animation eva, especially the the Project Runway or ANTM sections. So it can be done, and done well I think.
on the flip side, I still see a lot of sites utilizing the ancient sin of mystery meat navigation, with graphics all over and nothing to contextualize them. Very often these sites consider themselves TOO COOL FOR SCHOOL.
going off what Joseph said above - there is definitely a generational gap in website response. Big issue at my work since our potential audience is between 19 to 70. If only they would listen to my brilliant ideas on resolving that ;-)
August 17, 2006 at 2:14 pm
True true, that site does a decent job with it. The features that make it decent, I think: a good amount of (print) context for most of the clips, and a pretty regular integration of text, images, and video (rather than heavy use of one or the other, interspersed with a little bit of something else). So then the expectation of anyone who reads that blog is that there’ll be those items in there, and I think it’s a lot easier to handle.
Also, to answer the question, yes, in many ways I am more of a late-30s-to-mid-40s kind of guy.
August 17, 2006 at 3:52 pm
PS I’m changing the title of this post because I arrived at work this morning to an email pointing out to me that “post-cum-rant” could be taken in many ways that Latin roots don’t figure into at all.