This article in WIRED tackles the way YouTube and other technologies fundamentally alter the way we think and create. It makes some interesting points:
What’s happening to video is like what happened to word processing. Back in the ’70s and early ’80s, publishing was a rarefied, expert job. Then Apple’s WYSIWYG interface made it drop-dead easy, enabling an explosion of weird new forms of micropublishing and zines. Laptop audio editing did the same thing, giving birth to the mashup and cut-and-paste subgenres of music. Then there’s photo manipulation, once a rarefied propaganda technique. Photoshop made it a folk art. Marshall McLuhan pointed out that whenever we get our hands on a new medium we tend to use it like older ones. Early TV broadcasts consisted of guys sitting around reading radio scripts because nobody had realized yet that TV could tell stories differently. It’s the same with much of today’s webcam video; most people still try to emulate TV and film. A bigger leap will occur when we get better tools for archiving and searching video. Then we’ll start using it the way we use paper or word processing: to take notes or mull over a problem, like Tom Cruise flipping through scenes at the beginning of Minority Report.
All that is true and fascinating, but then there’s this:
I know people who use Skype for virtual closeness, leaving a video channel to their spouses open all day long while they work. They’re not even looking at the feed or talking; it’s like emotional wallpaper. Who would have thought of doing that with a $10,000 videoconferencing rig?
Do people actually do this?!
Tags: marriage, Technology, youtube
