Thoughts 23.9.23

The first of many (few) blogs of me screaming into the void. I don't think I am really writing these with the intention that they are for your reading pleasure - not that it bothers me if you do read them, in a way they do kind of exist for you - but that I am writing these mostly so I have somewhere to let out some of my thoughts.

I have been thinking about how much media people consume. It is unbelievable how many hours and hours of online content exists. It has become part of the daily routine for a 21st century human to spend a few (or many) hours consuming this kind of media. Most of it offers nothing, except to be a distraction, to cloud out your thoughts and plug your ears from the world for a while. Which itself is not inherently wrong, I think everybody needs a break now and then. But this kind of media seems to go beyond relaxing entertainment or fulfilling content - only filled with complete nonsense.

Compare this with much online content - notice how so much of it is pointless rambling about pointless things played over footage of something entirely irrelevant and pointless as well. The most common I see is video game footage and a drab sounding narrator explain e-drama, political drama (p-drama?) or attempting to educate the viewer (presenting opinion as fact, misinterpreting information, or flat out lying). I have found myself watching this kind of content and realising that I neither cared nor was entertained by it. It simply stole my concentration for a long enough period of time to make me feel as though I was occupied. This kind of theft-of-concentration usually appears in the form of video 'essays' which are far too long to leave the viewer with any meaningful takeaway; or video clips, which are far too short to leave the viewer with any meaningful takeaway.

On the longer form video essays, it seems (although there do exist many very informative and well crafted video essays) that so many are unnecessarily lengthy and far too bold in their claims. As if the creator starts the process by coming to a conclusion, and then talks about unrelated things for thirty minutes or so, and sometimes tries to loosely connect his (often very radical) conclusion with the unrelated information (although many times the two are never really connected at all, leaving the viewer with the same appetite he hoped to quench!). I suppose these video essays grew in popularity to the trend of shorter 10-minute videos of the previous years which did not offer the 'professionalism' and 'academic swagger' of a 'video essay'. Yuck.

The short clips, reels, or whatever they are called are also equally bothersome. They (like video essays) push around information as fact without supporting it. With the added addictive element of a bite-sized format. It is therefore ridiculously easy to sit in a rut for 20 minutes brainlessly scrolling (doom scrolling as it is very accurately referred to). There is this element that, "the next one will be good!" Which keeps the viewer locked in with a false sense of hope until he has a moment of clarity and puts away his cellphone. Twice yuck.

But that is just some rambling on these topics. I suppose it is nothing new, as such forms of content have existed for a while now, but it seems to me that the quality has dropped so drastically that it warrants me being grumpy on some obscure corner of the internet for a while. Maybe in the next (?) blog post I will have something a little more uplifting, interesting, and generally less whiny than in this one. But I don't count on it. Thrice yuck.

-bdof