YouTube good. Video news bad.

I have been a fan of YouTube since their early days, and with my increasing disdain for 'social networking' sites and their mind-numbing fascination with meaningless trivia, I still find it to be one of the few 'popular' websites that I visit on any regular basis. As an aging geezer, I find it refreshing to be able to relive my youth and invigorate my old age with these videos (included at the bottom of the post for your convenience):

a) Dreadfully dated cartoon shows like Captain Pugwash (video)

b) Music videos, such as the best rock song ever made (video)
Editor's recommendation: Listen to this one while you read the post.

c) Possibly the best puppet show ever made - The Flowerpot Men (video)

and

d) A variety of 'moving' theme songs from TV shows and movies of the 50s and the 60s, like Cheyenne, Bronco, The Alamo and The Guns of Navarone. (videos)

All memorable, all worth watching or listening to and all inspirational. Now let's fast forward to today and review some interesting developments in our interconnected age. News reporting has changed significantly as computers and the Internet have replaced newspapers and print media. I am one of those obsessive geeks who checks the little 'rolling' news images on Yahoo all the time. In between work/blogging/watching movies or doing anything else on the computer I will invariably click back to my home page and update my already overstimulated brain with one little piece of news trivia or another.

Lately, however, I have noticed a disturbing trend away from written-word reporting towards video reporting.

Just a few years ago, or so it seems, one of those dreadful 'video news' stories would be accompanied by an appropriately written report for the grown-ups. Now it seems that the written part is disappearing, due, no doubt, to the failures of our education system in teaching correct English, and we are increasingly being left with ONLY the video part. It also seems that the actual number of these 'video news' stories has significantly increased as well.

Just recently, it would have taken me, at most, 5 seconds to read the two short paragraphs about which exotic pet some NFL player or another now owns. I could then store it away in the 'worthless trivia' part of my brain, ready for regurgitation at a Facebook Convention where it would no doubt fascinate all the brain-dead attendees. But now, no such luck. I have to click on the video to start it (already a waste of time and age-decreasing muscle power), watch a 30 second ad for something I would never buy in a month of Sundays, and then the worst part begins. I have to sit through the so called 'banter' of one or more vacuous TV reporters (redundant) while they laugh with one another and introduce yet another vacuous TV reporter who will make a full-scale production out of a single word answer like "leopard" (not sure if this is correct, as I never bothered to watch the video about which pet the NFL player actually did own). All in all, what should have taken me 5 seconds to learn, took me over 3 minutes!

I will live with the ads whenever I have to watch Hulu, or nowadays even some YouTube videos, as I understand how capitalism works and I realize that there really is no such thing as a 'free' Internet. I also understand that the undereducated masses will mindlessly entertain themselves with 3 minutes of video footage to learn but one word, but can the brighter ones among us not just have at least the choice of reading? Interconnectivity has many advantages, but perhaps we are intellectually regressing as a species. Let's take a quick look at the history of information passing ...

Sagas - ancient stories verbally related by one human to many, but we used to forget stuff, so we had to come up with a way to permanently record stuff and so we invented -

Heiroglyphs - little pictures, each of which represented an idea. Then we could at least permanently record stuff, but coming up with new pictures got tiresome, so we invented -

Alphabets - where we could put a limited number of strange little heiroglyphs together to represent the idea. Alphabets begat words, which begat sentences, which begat paragraphs, which begat books, which begat repetitive knowledge transfer etc.

... and so we end up today with what has become the crowning glory of man's ability to communicate information - the written word. It takes less than 1 second to read "leopard", but oh no, instead, we have regressed to 'moving heiroglyphs' (i.e. videos) that take 3 minutes to pass on that single piece of information.

I am so very grateful to be alive in 'The Information Age', where we can now waste so much time on gaining so little knowledge!

Glyn Meek, with 40 years of experience in the technology industry, has earned his curmudgeonly outlook.

UPDATE - Damn it, I HAD to go look. Actually, it was an "alligator" not a "leopard".

CAPTAIN PUGWASH:

BEST ROCK SONG EVER:

POSSIBLY THE BEST PUPPET SHOW:

CHEYENNE THEME SONG:

BRONCO THEME SONG:

THE ALAMO THEME SONG:

THE GUNS OF NAVARONE THEME SONG: