I’ve always scoffed at the “only your kids know how to program your VCR” class of jokes. Being a Unix graybeard and general tech-head since childhood, I never struggled with technology. After I had children of my own, I remained a step ahead of them on all things technology even when they reached their teens and were shockingly tech competent on their own.
I wondered when I’d reach the tech divide: when I’d part company with the new ways of tech and feel as though the younger generation was leaving me behind. I realized some years ago that the divide was video instructions. So often these days, people throw together a video instead of writing things down. I get it — it’s 1,000 times easier to just push the button on your phone and blather on for 7 minutes than to actually take the time to write something down and make it comprehensible. You can feel as though you have accomplished something, and if you bother to even play it back before you disseminate it, well, it’s almost certainly going to make sense to you even if it’s gibberish to anyone else.
It’s led to a lot of grief. It’s far easier to spread misinformation by video than text. Spewing your conspiracy rot is quick and easy, and your viewers, if they want to fact-check you, are forced to scrub through videos, reverse, fast forward, and transcribe bits of it to get some searchable text to verify if what you say is true. You can avail yourself of the propagandists’ trick of throwing a bunch of true, somewhat true, and outright false points in rapid fire to overwhelm confound your viewers. My patients were always saying things like “please just watch this one 20-minute video” and I came to realize that just a quick watch would burn 20 minutes of my time (that was most of an entire patient visit in my world, and several for most doctors) but that would be only for a quick watch. If I wanted to be able to discuss with the patient the logical fallacies, inaccuracies, or downright lies that were often in the videos, it would take me an hour or more of dissecting the video and chasing down references. Usually the quickest way to to generate a transcription (much easier now than a few years ago) and work from that, but that’s another chunk of time that should have been borne (once) by the publisher, not each and every time a viewer wants to go beyond the very outer surface of the arguments.
It’s even worse with how-to videos. There’s a standing joke on Reddit that you should start how-to videos 33% in because that’s when the real information starts. You know how the videos go (and I’m not even going to talk about ads):
- Hi! I’m VideoSmarmy123, welcome to my channel. (Put your credits at the end. If you’re afraid I won’t get that far, get a clue.)
- If you find this video useful, don’t forget to like and subscribe! (Self-promotion is nauseating.)
- Today, I’m going to show you how to put air in a tire. (Uh, that’s why I’m watching this. If the title didn’t convey that, you’ve really messed up.)
- Keeping proper inflation in your tires helps your gas mileage, improves tire life, and makes for a safer ride. (I came here to learn how to inflate, not to be sold on the virtues of inflating.)
- Like and subscribe! (self-promotion)
- Ten seconds of actually showing how to inflate, but skipping all the nuance and tricky bits.
- I hope you enjoyed this video! (No, I’m frustrated because I already knew the part you showed me, I was looking for actual helpful tips.)
- LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE!!!!!
- Outro with information on whom I should credit for wasting my time.
- LLIIKKEE AANNDD SSUUBBSSCCRRIIBBEE !!!!
Today, though, I ran into this video which takes the cake. I have a pair of 1MORE SonoFlow over-the-ear ANC headphones. They great, and the price was phenomenal. But HA wanted to use them, I didn’t remember offhand how to pair them with a new device, and the manual is not yet unpacked. I thought I could do a quick online search and just maybe it would return something like “press the volume up and down buttons simultaneously to enter pairing mode.” If only.
Instead I got directed to the video which literally displays one line from the manual every 15-20 seconds with an insipid soundtrack in the background. I had to sit through an intro showing what came in the box (15 seconds of insipid music) how to turn them on (15 seconds of insipid music), how to turn them off (15 seconds of insipid music), how to pair them when they’re new out-of-the-box (15 seconds of insipid music)… You get the picture. In the end, it took over 3 minutes of insipid music to display the one line I needed (“press the volume up and down buttons simultaneously to enter pairing mode”). There’s a valid accessibility argument in favor of reading the lines, but they didn’t even do that. They just displayed text on the screen so someone with a visual processing deficit would still be better off with a plain text web page.
Is this the logical endpoint of pivot-to-video?
—2p