Bob Hayes Online

Terry Pratchett, probably my favorite author, has been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. He is optimistic and positive, and asks that his fans be the same - so other than to wish him the very best and to pray for his recovery, I will say no more.

I’ll grant you, video is cool technology. And I’ll concede that it’s neat to be able to embed videos onto web sites and such - it adds something to be able to play a movie clip relevant to a news story or blog post, for example.

But.

That doesn’t mean that I want my nice, text-oriented, written Web to turn into a TV show with high load times and lots of hiccuping. It seems like every time I go to a favorite site (case in point: the Onion), there are more and more video stories crowding out what I’m there to get: writing. I’m not a videophobe - I see the merit of this content, as I’ve noted. But video is intrinsically inefficient because it is based on sound and verbal language; it takes a news reporter 120 seconds to badly summarize what I could comprehensively review in 20 seconds. Video makes sense when the story is about a cat who can do backflips - I want to see that. For Mitt Romney’s tax policy, I want to see something more along the lines of written analysis.

The thing is, there’s already a place where video has primacy: the television. It’s OK that video is putting out tentacles and finding a home on the web. But let’s remember what this Web thingie is for - and not turn it into just another forum for the talking heads.