Tag Archives: YouTube

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When ‘Tell Me’ Beats ‘Show Me’

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Internet giants seem to be racing to the bottom by turning their news sites into picture books with bright colors and sparse content.

Tech is turning out more drek. Why is almost every site trying to convert their news into clickbait pictures? We don’t need to see B-roll footage of the misery in Gaza for a story about what the next steps to secure peace might be. The real news lies in the thinking of figures in Gaza, the White House and Tel Aviv. We also need clear numbers rather than images to account for the ruinous health care costs facing many Americans.

For what it is worth, this insight came to me after a necessary upgrade to  Windows-11. After purchasing a new computer to be able to manage the decidedly underwhelming software, Microsoft thrust it’s MSM Webpage at me as an added bonus. It was enough to trigger my frustration.

Their page of ads and news “stories” caught my eye quite literally. The layout of the version I saw was a stash of videos dealing with everything from the weather to news about barely qualified people seeking White House jobs. The real meat of some of these stories could be more efficiently presented in straightforward reporting and more than 500 words of text.

One medium is never fully convertible into another medium.

We all love visual stories. But the hard truth is that a person’s world becomes highly circumscribed if their access to big and important ideas is hobbled with the need for interesting pictures. I noticed my frustration because my new computer came with glitches that needed to be fixed by adjustments to specific settings, none of which were well explained by a person on YouTube who assumed his job was to show me something. I was looking for lists and sequences, which had to be awkwardly communicated off camera by a tech who was trying to be helpful.

My mistake was turning to a visual medium. I finally got help from a print-oriented forum where the emphasis was on explanation and amplification, not interesting images.

As this site has noted before, many worthy ideas do not have an easy visual form. Policies, values, administrative decisions, directions on fixing a computer problem and similar kinds of topics need discursive amplification, not a talking head proceeding at the glacial pace of 200 words a minute.  Ditto for help in speeding up my slow computer. YouTube can be helpful in showing how to fix things; but not so much if there is a lot of telling to do as well. It has unfortunately become the default medium for explaining something, even when the explainer has no flair for visual communication. It is used because it is there.  If you find yourself frantically taking notes from a segment, you can understand the paradox of having to translate from a medium of images to a medium of ideas. As we know, at least intuitively, one medium is never fully convertible into another medium.

Recent news stories report another decline in the reading ability of the nation’s grade-schoolers occurring along with handwringing from professors at Harvard complaining that their students won’t read. If we wonder what the cost of turning our kids into smartphone addicts is, we may not need to look any further. The small screens of those phones and their equivalents are full of junk images and too little supporting text.

It does not have to be this way. A glance at The Week Junior, the popular weekly news magazine for kids, shows how non visual topics can be covered in effective ways. Even subjects like freedom of speech and the characteristics of good poetry can be explained in interesting and age-appropriate levels. The Week Junior is a model of how our children should spend more of their time.

Obviously, visual clickbait functions as a hook to pull a consumer in. But I worry that we are aiming at the low. Young “readers” may need primary colors and cartoon images at the gateway of literacy. But older readers should be self-starters. If we allow the acquisition of knowledge and new information to proceed at the pace of a poky PowerPoint show, we can only admire our predecessors who understood that advanced insights require the incisive comprehension of a master reader.

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Surprise! YouTube is Now the Top Television Platform in the U.S.

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What may come as a surprise is that a company known first as an internet gateway is the source of more hours of television viewing than any other provider.

If you have a clear memory of life before 2000 you might expect that television is still about networks, 13 week “seasons” of comedies and dramas, and any number of television “specials,” usually built around a singer or a beloved comedy performer. But that also dates those of us who think in terms of the programming appearing on the standard over-the-air VHF channels 2 through 13.

A lot has changed in the television universe. Most dramatically, top programs have migrated to platforms that have nothing to do with the original idea of “broadcasting,” which means delivering a television signal to an antenna. Obviously, cable providers carry their own networks as well as those who still broadcast. And we now look for content that is mostly “on demand.”  What may come as a surprise is that a company known first as a computer content platform is the source of more hours of television viewing than any other provider. This is according to Nielsen Research data. YouTube, a branch of Alphabet Inc., arose to the top from its origins in Google.

Nielsen Research Data

YouTube takes no single form or point of view. Each user sets the parameters in the algorithms for videos they may watch. My YouTube habits would in no way mirror yours, unless you like pipe organs in the United Kingdom or a bass guitarist with interesting videos on music theory.

The specificity of content the single most significant element of the platform. It has made it possible to search and find content that matches a viewer’s interests. Few of us studying the mass media in the 1970s could have imagined that “television” could be tailored to the quirkiest  interests. It may be as close as we get to democratizing media. As Jacqueline Zote notes in Sprout Social, the average user spends 48 minutes a day watching YouTube. Younger men are a key demographic in the U.S.  And if its possible, there are even more avid viewers in India. Ads appear if viewers use only the free service, but they are a bit less intrusive than on broadcast television. And, mostly, they won’t butcher an extended music performance.

Because there are both private as well as institutional sources of videos (i.e. a single English historian with interesting ideas, as well as legacy broadcasters like BBC News), viewers need to avoid the mistake of thinking of all videos as having equal veracity.  Fools and fantasists often have an inflated view of their talents, and are often all too willing to display them. A viewer needs to choose sources and their motives carefully.

Not only is YouTube a redefinition of what television is, it is also a medium that thrives at least as much on small screens and computers as well as traditional home sets. Its an internet site, but now also a regular program source for television viewers. Maybe “television” is the wrong word since much of YouTube’s content originates on demand, and outside of the traditions and usual pathways used in professional entertainment. Anyone can upload a YouTube video or be a mobile user of the medium. The results range from the local elementary school showing part of its holiday pageant, to German public television with a full documentary on the free but nervous Baltic states bordering Russia. There is no shortage of individual content providers. In addition, public broadcasters and some news organizations release scores of fascinating programs that would be at home on Netflix. They represent the very tip of professionally produced content. At the other end of the spectrum, some YouTubers clearly have little talent for explaining or organizing material. But more than we might guess, many show evidence of mastering the rudiments of writing, lighting, sound, camera usage and editing. Producing a good video is a humbling experience that takes time and a degree of talent.  We are usually not talking about 4K here. But neither are most YouTube videos going to look like your grandfather’s home movies. For example, Katie Steckly offers a primer for novices who want to start their own series.  At last count she has around 300 subscribers.

Providers of content have good reason to complain if they expect their content will provide a significant revenue stream. Even though there are 100 million paying subscribers, it’s hard to get enough views to make money on YouTube. Even a thousand hits on a person’s YouTube site will only make enough cash to buy lunch. On the other hand, opening up video production to nearly any source has lead to some surprisingly good offerings.

On the downside, a universe of discourse nearly as broad as the population means that a lot of misinformation, anti-social content, and other forms of video mischief are sometimes left on the site.

As boomer undergraduates studying media, we thought of the three primary networks as the largest of the American mass media. Even throw away content got huge audiences. We were pretty sure print would be the pathway used by thinkers and innovators to reach audiences with very specific interests. Now the advent of video has turned that world upside down. The best of independent content providers can almost match the slick offerings of a network. Traditional broadcasting and most on-demand platforms—including Google—exist to make money; but YouTube videos are ubiquitous because content providers usually have a strong appetite for the subject that they want to share.