Death to the Video Blog or Why writers are better than everyone

[PayDay]

http://www.somethingawful.com/news/youtube-veda-vlog/1/

Normally, articles on this site are jokes, as in fictional representations of factual events with cynicism and sarcasm interlaced. Not this one:

Secondly, writing, as opposed to spontaneous speaking, demands some level of organization and coherence. As anyone who's started a blog and promised to write daily for even a month discovers to his acute dismay, putting words in some kind of narrative or critical order is work. There's a reason why it's an actual*job, while "speaking for a maximum of ten minutes into the void, about no discernible topic and for no discernible goal" only counts as a sustainable occupation if you're doing it on a webcam while inserting things inside you for tokens. The obligations of the form that give weight to it, that demand struggle and labor, are what make it relatable. Writing orders things by its very nature. A diary may be as inane as a vlog, but the writing in a diary omits the anxious pauses, the uncertainty of articulation, the gaps in thought. Whereas when one watches a typical vlog, one directly confronts the failure of communication. Like the sounds of silence, it's talking without speaking.

Pretty good write-up bashing idiots.

If the internet has taught us anything, it's that one need not have something to say in order to talk. But the pathologically empty vlogs posted to YouTube boggle the mind. The strange, unconscious reflexivity of these videos, people speaking*about*having nothing to say -- coupled with the reality of a person sitting alone in a room, speaking into the impenetrable gaze of a camera -- reveals a fundamental shift in both interpersonal relations and how the individual relates to society itself, Lacan's big Other.
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Like writing, public speaking is also*work. There's a reason why people take classes in it, why it's both a talent and a skill. Even speakers born with natural charisma must learn to harness their nervous energy to a positive purpose, to project and enunciate, to practice the forms that their natural gifts can make seem formless. They dare to do something, however small its focus. The act of speaking publicly is profoundly vulnerable, one that risks never seizing another's attention while also conceding that even those willing to listen will leave unmoved, unpersuaded and uninterested.
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Thus the vlog medium hides behind the act of its performance. This brings us to the central point of why vlogs are so awkward to watch, much less to make: human speech developed as necessary interpersonal dialogue, a give and take between two or more people in order to transfer and develop ideas that otherwise could remain locked dangerously and despairingly forever inside the mind. Vlogs operate as desperate monologues, cast into the ethereal abyss of the internet, addressed to a non-existent Other, in the futile hopes of peer validation. Even adding the function of allowing others to make a response video does nothing to ameliorate the atmosphere of vain appeals to nothingness. In essence, vlogs seem more akin to prayer or schizophrenic babbling than to diary writing.

 

[Ldy_Sea]

Not to mention I can read an article describing a video faster than the video can load usually.

If I open something that caught my attention and find it's a video I close it. Ain't no one got time for buffering.