 | CPC+: Hate Beats by Ukonx 2007 - http://CPCRulez.free.fr Hate Beats (2007 / cpc+) Code : Power Misc code/Algo : Deemphasis Originals GFXs : Unison + Ozane Retouch GFXs : Grimmy from Semilanceata Music : Deemphasis |
 | A message about the president deemphasis. re emphasis. |
 | Commentary on YouTube This video is a response to a perceived dumbing down of the workings of YouTube, discouraging thoughtful video/text discussion as well as hindering the usability of the website. What prompted this commentary was a series of small changes that have been made to the YouTube's interface over the past couple of days, including truncating the displayed names of videos on a member's profile videos page to 27 characters (followed by an elipsis). They've also added some sort of weird, "interactive" bubble thing that isn't worth taking the the time to describe, but the video titles in that are truncated at somewhere just over 20 characters. Despite the fact that it warn't broke, it seems that YouTube is attempting to refine the way in which they deliver videos, and I feel that many of the changes they're making are indicative of a general deemphasis on textual information in favor of wacky pet videos and thumbnails of wacky pet videos. In a practical sense, this style of presenting videos impairs the functionality of the website by providing less information about the videos one is browsing through. I've already encountered videos in a series that are indistinguishable from one another other than their icons because most videos posted in a series are listed by a general title and then followed by a descriptor like "(1 of 10)." When that information is at the end of a title that's too long (by YouTube's standards), it gets cut off on the page that indexes a members' videos. Currently, you'll probably be able to read about the first seven or eight words of this video description without having to click on a link labeled "more" to expand it out to its full size. The main purpose of this is most likely that the text description of a video is located above the linked video recommendations, and it's in the interest of YouTube to have those video links placed as prominently as possible in order to increase the amount of time that people spend using the website. While this isn't a problem for videos whose description is something like "josh is such a fag lol," it discourages the people posting videos from offering background information relating to the videos their posting, which, when provided, is usually very informative and creates a stronger emotional/intellectual connection with the video. The most commonly-encountered roadblock to actual thoughtful discussion is, for me, the character limit on video comments. It's 255 characters, which really isn't enough to make a complex statement of any consequence. This very efficiently discourages one from trying to offer a complex response to a video or its comments since you'll either have to rephrase/abbreviate your comment or post it over the span of one of more comments. These comments can be broken up by the threaded nature of responses, and they also end up in reverse order on the separate comment page. All of these things, taken together, indicate a general trend of stiffling the use of textual information in relation to YouTube videos, whether in be in a video's title, desctiption, or its comments. I'll be the first to recognize that YouTube wasn't created as a means of furthering intellectual discussion; it's a video-sharing website. It has, however, become a vast source of cultural (and some academic) information and a very prominent feature of the lives of people the world over. People spend a lot of time on here, and the discouragement, intentional or not, of meaningful and complex thought as part those users' experience is very disappointing, and, I'd say, irresponsible in consideration of YouTube's prominence in world society. |
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