Video Killed the Radio Star

    

"And now I understand the problems" -The Buggles

This is not a post about MTV's tongue-in-cheek first ever music video, aired on August 1, 1981, back when they played music videos. This is a post about videos in general though, and how they have changed the humans. 

I often turn to the internet for help with various tasks. Sometimes I'm looking for a video game walkthrough, other times I am trying to fix some household object, and still other times I am looking for help with a program or app. 

Now, before I delve too deep into videos, I should start out by saying that I am a reader. I have been reading for as long as I can remember. My parents tell me I was reading well before I went to school. I have reason to question their memory in general but, since I can't remember actually learning how to read, I will trust them on this one. My stepfather came into my life just before I turned three. The story goes he was told I could read already and didn't believe my mother. So he sat me down with a newspaper and I read the headlines to him. I'm sure I didn't understand what the headlines meant at that age, but I could at least sound them out. School was boring. Jokes on me, now I work at one.

Back to scouring the internet for help. In my searches over the years I have discovered two things: the internet is an amazing source of information for even the most obscure topics and articles have been slowly replaced by videos. There are only a few, rare instances in which watching an instructional video is preferable to reading the solution at my own pace. Mostly these are relegated to some household object in which I need to see not only the piece I need to work on, but also the specific movements I need to make to fix said object. This does not happen very often. Mostly a picture will do. 

However, I am in the minority on this. No one wants to read. They never did, but they used to be forced to do so. Now, why bother reading something when you can watch a video instead? It's awful, pervasive, and I hate it. Reading comprehension is at an all time low since worldwide data collection began and Americans are falling behind. It's possible that since videos have killed written instructions worldwide that this will start to affect other countries as well. But I don't have to deal with other countries. I have to deal with Americans, and their reading comprehension sucks. Go take a look at any given comment section anywhere on the internet and see what I mean. I'll wait because this isn't a video.

Which brings me to one of the main reasons I prefer writing to videos: I don't have to pause it. I can just stop reading. Way easier than finding the pause button. Need to follow part of the instructions before moving on? Just stop reading. Need to study a picture to see what they are talking about? Just stop reading. Interrupted by your dog needing to go out? Just stop reading. Simple as that. With a video you have to pause, miss things, rewind to find your place. Ugh.

Next reason for preferring reading to video: I read faster than people talk. Why would I sit there and listen to someone talk to me when I can read it and get the info I need three times faster than if they are saying it out loud to me? Four times faster if the person speaking in the video is a southerner. No offense to southerners, but they do talk slower than northerners. Very frustrating depending on the state, looking at you Louisiana. (No Louisianans were harmed in the making of this post) They do however have the slowest speaking rate in the country according to the internet. I didn't need to watch a video for that statistic.

I searched for some help with an app this morning, which prompted this post, and was met with the entire first Google page being completely filled with videos. Not a single link to an article or even a Reddit post. I had to go to page two. Page two!

When my nephew was young, but old enough to have a phone and be on YouTube, he started wanting to show me videos all the time. It was annoying, but I obliged, as you do. Some of them were funny, but most were not. Chalk it up to different generations having different types of preferred humor. So I obliged, but he wasn't the only one. The kids all started watching tons of videos, then Vine came along and the videos became shorter and shorter. Now we have TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and every other platform that tries to join in the trend. And the attention spans became shorter and shorter right alongside the videos. We did it for the vine and now we are all suffering.