Do I *have* to like podcasts an’ videos an’ all?

A rant! Curmudgeon mode on! Whiners engaged! :)

Do I have to like podcasts an’ videos an’ all? ’cause, well, I don’t.

People…. talk…. really…. really… slowly.

Not only that, but listening to a voice means either disturbing the people around me (and there usually are people around me), or finding some annoying ear-things with wires and all. Watching a video means spending the bandwidth to download it, hoping it will be compatible with whatever the heck the web browser decides to give it to to play, and then listening to the voice that goes along with it (see above).

I watched the little video about someone’s impression of SL’s Fifth Birthday here, and it was not a content-dense experience. It look a perceptible amount of time to start playing, and it ran long enough that I got interrupted once by someone popping in to ask me about an email. In actual content it had maybe two short paragraphs of text, that I could have read in maybe ten or fifteen seconds; the titles and background music and cute flythrough zooms of various SL5B builds and closeups of the author’s AV face added nothing whatever to the information content (intellectual, emotional, or aesthetic) of the piece.

Not to pick on this particular video; they’re pretty much all like that, where “they” is podcasts and videos that are delivering what’s essentially a narrative verbal linear message of some kind. Not content-dense, not efficient users of my time.

I almost never listen to podcasts. The people talk too slowly, they stop to chuckle at themselves or fiddle with the microphone, they in general exude a “you have all the time in the world to sit there listening to me” attitude that, I have to admit, annoys me. Sometimes people post “utterz” to twitter; I started to listen to one once, and decided after fifteen seconds that it wasn’t a good use of time.

I’m perfectly happy to take my time one-on-one with a friend, or many-on-many at an interesting party or gathering. Dunno why; likely because it’s interactive, and mutual. But listen passively to someone talking at the terribly slow speed of speech, or spend five precious never-to-be-recaptured seconds watching someone’s cute title-fade before the possibly-interesting part of their video starts?

No fanks.

Okay okay end rant. :) Was fun, tho!