multimedia overload

I saw a very strange thing today. In response to Chris’s post about MySpace’s Digg clone, SearchAnyway replied using video. But if you listen to the whole one minute and forty seconds of the video, there’s nothing in it except for a guy talking, trying to explain to News Corp that removing the “Digg” button would be a bad move and would ostracize a user community.

After watching the video in its entirety, I couldn’t help but wonder if video was necessary for the points that the other Chris wanted to get across. It would make for a great written blog, but video? After all, it was just a monologue of a guy making an argument, which would have done much better in the written word with the necessary emphasis.

While online video is a “technological breakthrough,” I don’t think there’s much effectiveness when video is being used this way to tell a story without any engaging aspects. As I wrote in December, we are already heavily overloaded with multimedia, and not everybody is ready to embrace it. Further, it’s hard for individuals to take the time out of the day to immerse themselves in content that is not easily multitaskable (my new word for the day; I told you I could have used Quizlet). Blog video defies the nature of blogging (and RSS). Once I start watching this speech, I have to watch it in its entirety. Some folks might be inclined to go so far as to say “I want that 1 minute 40 seconds of my life back.”