I liked the video, there are certain points that he made that I totally agree with. For instance, the concept of distraction, the glorification or at least the preponderance of short thinking. Also, it used to be, it took more than knowing how to dance down the aisle at your wedding in order to be famous or seen by millions of people. It’s watered down things to the point that we have sites where everybody is an expert or a star in much shorter order than, say, it took people who first revolutionized performing arts to become one.
The clutter brought about by viral media also drowns out the smart stuff, this guy says, and I agree. For every video teaching you how to do something or making a point, there’s 10 videos of a guy trying to make his cat play the ukulele.
I also agree with the positives of segmentization. I am no Web wizard and I have had people from all over America listen to my little podcasts of a nowhere team playing in a nowhere city, just because I happen to offer what they want. I think that’s awesome. It also reminded me, however, of the phenomenon that occurred a few years back with magazines, where a magazine for sports became a magazine for that sport and a magazine for that sport and a magazine for that sport; which in time became a magazine each for sport 1, left-handed practitioners of sport 1, sport 2, Latino practitioners of sport 2, sport 3 and female practitioners of sport 3.
Anyway, if there was something I could add to this video would be in the area of cons. Yeah, thanks to sites like MySpace and Facebook and that one that sounds like a trembling body spasm, we are able to stay in touch easier than we used to. But we’ve also lost face-to-face time. There have been times when my wife and I are both on Facebook, doing two separate things, not a word exchanged between us, and we’re sitting on the same couch! It’s come to the point sometimes that for people Facebook has become sort of an escapism from having to deal with three-dimensional people.
Lastly, all this viral stuff may be doing wonders for some, but it’s hell on my attention span. I disconnected twice while the guy was talking and I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that his was one of the most interesting points I’d seen made on the Web that day.
“Any activity engaged in by more than four people in this country, has got a magazine devoted to it. Skydiving, snowmobiling, Back-packing, , Bungee jumping. Duck hunting, skeet-shooting, playing pool, shooting someone in the ass with a dart gun…they probably got a magazine for that,” -George Carlin.
