Friday 2 May 2014

Video feed. Food. Fodder.

I follow a few interesting content and design websites that serve information that’s generally a little left of centre, and for the most part they’re surprisingly elucidating and stimulating.

In return for my loyalty, they throw up tantalising pics and copy onto my Facebook page, and sometimes I even click on the links to see what’s on offer.

Which is usually a video. And which is the moment I usually close the page.

Yes, I’m old (school), but for the love of simple sanity, please give me a text article that I can scan in a minute, decide what’s important for myself, and go back and focus on certain bits if I feel like it. Instead, I’m faced with endless video nasties where the point of the thing is made at eight minutes and thirty-seven seconds.

Don’t get me wrong. I love sites like upworthy.com.  “A Kid Got Revenge On His Bully And Immediately Regretted It” (sic) sounds amazing. But I really don’t want to watch a 13-minute video about said bullying and said revenge. I want to read (because I can), and filter out the proverbial bullshit from the cherry pie for myself. Instead, I’ve now missed out on  a story about bullies being re-bullied, and perhaps even bullying back. All I’ve concluded is that in the interchange, everyone lost. Which maybe they didn’t. Perhaps everyone won. I’ll never know. What I do know is that nobody bothered to write anything down at the time.

The little I remember of my journalism studies (other than how to touch-type – thank you, four-year Journ degree) is how to structure a news story. Think inverted triangle – the fat bit at the top is all the important stuff, and as it tails off the copy and the content gets thinner and less significant. It meant that the sub-editor could trim articles from the bottom up to suit the layout, and to the reader it meant that he or she needn’t read the whole thing to get the gist of the story. Of course it's different now – now you need to tease people into clicking through to your content. Hence lines on your newsfeed like, "She swallowed 50 kilograms of earthworms and you won't believe what happened next," or, "He took on a grizzly bear with a spatula and a pair of socks - who came out tops?"

Back in the day, the bullying story might have opened with the following: “A bully found the tables turned when his victim impaled him on a wooden spike” (I don’t know if that’s what happened because I didn’t watch the video, but you understand my point). You get it in fifteen words, and then it’s up to you whether or not to read the rest.

These days, it seems we’re caught between semi-literacy and common-or-garden imbecility. We’re training ourselves to think, and talk, in bites – bytes? – of information. We’re Whatsapping and BBMing and twittering and squittering with no bigger-picture thought of what we’re putting out there. Little bits of schmick-schmack that demonstrate nothing more than the proliferation of pointless information, while emphasising the screaming dearth of wisdom. Dickens, the man who wrote books the size of tombstones with nothing more than a quill pen and some spit, would wet himself.

Of course language morphs and develops. If it didn’t, we’d all be speaking like Chaucer, or discussing Beowulf over the braai, sounding like we were choking on chop bones. But really, people – it’s speech that made us human in the first place, and writing that made us even more so. So when a baby copywriter stuck her head into my office the other day to argue against a grammatically-correct apostrophe because it looked ugly in print, I didn’t feel bad that she left in tears with her apostrophe screwed firmly to the sticking place.

Apostrophes – every time you use them to make a plural, a puppy dies. Every time you omit them from a possessive, the Pope’s underpants catch fire. Either way, you’re going to hell.

Hasthtag just saying.