If I Ran YouTube (Or Any Internet Video Site)
It’s not always serious advice and somber observations here at this blog. I am Too XYZ to concentrate on the directly productive 100% of the time. In fact, a little irony I like to live by is that only by chosing to step away from productivity once in a while, can we maximize it.
All of that being said, I hope you find some degree of reason to this list. A list which I have compiled that explains what I would require all people who post their own videos (not copyright infringed theft) to do, if they wanted to post to the site.
So, my edicts would be as follows:
1) TURN ON A DAMN LIGHT!
Half the home videos end up being sound only, with an occasional light flicker as people walk or sit in total darkness. Why post a video at all? Post a sound file over on MegaUpload or something.
2) DO NOT HOLD A CAMERA SIDEWAYS! EVER!
When you do this, the picture comes out sideways. Yes, I realize that the physical universe does not appear to be sideways through the viewfinder when you turn the camera, genius, but trust me, it will end up being sideways when viewed. This has been true for basically every single solitary camera ever made in the history of humanity. And people still think that it is a great way to fit more stuff into the shot…
3) ABSOLUTELY NOTHING UNDER 20 SECONDS LONG.
I don’t care if it’s the the alien landing, the return of Jesus or anything or similar magnitude. If it’s less than 20 seconds long don’t post it. At least add a bit of an intro to it, or some commentary afterward.
4) HOLD THE DAMN CAMERA STILL!
If you must video and post your slumber party, focus on one object or person for at least 10 seconds before moving. You cannot walk around a house and turn the camera to every object or person you think of at the second they enter your mind. When you do so, nobody can tell what the hell they are looking at.
5) STOP THE CHIPMUNK SHIT!!!!
Let me be clear…there is no longer even the remotest amount of humor or entertainment value in speeding up an otherwise pointless, boring video to double speed so that everyone in it sounds like they are one of the Chipmunks. I get enough of that shit at Christmas time, I don’t need it when I am trying to watch your video.
6) NO MORE SINGING ALONG WITH YOUR FAVORITE TRACK.
To begin with, music coming through a speaker, then passing through your camera, and then passing through my own computer’s speakers sounds like shit. Secondly, few things are more annoying than people trying to prove they have some kind of musical talent by singing their cover of a song ON TOP of the original. I hate watching other people sing on YouTube anyway, but if you are going to do it, sing your own shit. Some people actually get marketed in that way. And if you must give us your pointless rendition of the latest Taylor Swift noise, get a karaoke copy of it so I don’t hear you and her. (Not that you are talented anyway.)
7) NO MORE “LOOK REALLY CLOSELY AND TURN UP THE VOLUME” VIDEOS WHERE SOMETHING JUMPS OUT AND “SCARES” YOU AT THE END.
I think I fell for the very first one of these I ever encountered, circa 2005. But I suppose the gullible out there still can’t see them coming right up Fifth Avenue. A long, quiet tracking shot on something either macabre, or out of place. Descriptions ranging from, “watch real closely” to, “I bet this video scares you.” You really, honest to god don’t realize that some half-assed image with a very loud obnoxious noise is about to blow your speakers away??
8) NO FAN FICTION! IT’S A VIDEO SITE!!!
Something with a 9-page story about the Twilight people disguised as a description of the video, a video which is actually only 15 seconds long with a slide show of Twilight characters and terrible fucking music in the background does not belong on YouTube. Or anywhere. If you want to rip off someone’s ideas and write fan-fiction, go ahead. But write it.
9) NO MORE “SHIPS”.
To the uninitiated “ships” are a pathetically lazy way of referring to “relationships”. Ship videos involve splicing together footage of two fictional characters from movies or TV that for some reason the creator wishes could be romantically involved with one another. All set to some sappy piece of shit love song. Pointless and a waste of time that borders on the immoral…
10) DON’T FILM SOMETHING FROM TV!!
Ignore the copyright problem here. If you are going to transfer something from TV to youtube, get a vid-capture card already. Don’t just point your camera at a TV that is playing the video you want. It looks and sounds like shit.
None of these rules will ever be instituted of course. (With the exception of copyrighted material, which is already forbidden of course.) But you have to admit that if they were, the garbage quotient on YouTube would drop by about 90%.
I Hate To Interrupt, But Maybe I Should? (A Featured Post on Brazen Careerist)
I really detest being interrupted while I am trying to have a conversation. I hate when people jump to another subject before I am finished my point. I hate it when people believe they know what the end of my sentence is going to be and finish it for me. And in general I hate to be in the middle of talking to someone else only to be approached, without pause or deference, by another person.
Which means, in turn, I am very unwilling to do all of this to other people. And as a rule, I don’t. I was raised not to, and even as an adult, I see very clearly the reasons why I was raised not to do these things. It’s disruptive, rude, and shows a lack of respect to the other person talking.
Exceptions exist of course, even for me. When I am with some of my oldest friends just goofing around we talk over each other about the dumb crap we usually talk about. A football game or the lame ass we used to know back in school. That’s part of being good friends I dare say. But only when I know someone well enough, and even then, only when the subject matter is not of particular importance, do I feel that over talking and cutting off is acceptable.
But when I am first meeting new people, I consider it very rude to not be allowed to finish what I am saying.
And yet sometimes I wonder if that is the only way people know how to converse anymore. And if that is true, is it the only way to clearly present the parts of you that are most interesting to a new acquaintance?
Anyone who follows me here, on Brazen Careerist, or on Twitter knows that I despise standard networking, and that I don’t do much of it. But some of the reasons I hate it I think have an effect on my interactions with people even when I am not networking. Namely, I like to let people finish their points before I offer something to a conversation.
But more and more, people don’t know how to finish their point, or are otherwise unwilling to just stop talking long enough for there to be any kind of pause to fill. As though people are afraid to stop talking. And so when they meet me, they end up talking in an unbroken string for 15 minutes, and I simply nod. That is because it is in my DNA not to interrupt someone new while they are speaking to me, if otherwise they are not being offensive, and not preventing me from doing something important. (And usually, they are not doing either.)
I wonder if the overall effect is that I seem like a boring person that hasn’t done much, or doesn’t have anything of interest to say. After all, if I had any passion for anything, I would interrupt once in a while, right? Maybe? And hence no connection is made.
I do hold other people responsible as well in this. The art of conversation, especially with people you have just met, dictates that you give and take. That you ask questions as often as you express an opinion or tell a story. But setting that aside, does the world find people who interrupt, and talk over, to be more interesting or engaging somehow than those that do not?
If so, I don’t know if I could ever adjust to doing something to others that I hate being done to me. (This is perhaps why I much prefer written communication.)
Nonetheless, what do you think? Do people like me need to become comfortable with talking over, or cutting off people, or finishing their thoughts in order to make more of an impression during a conversation?
Why “In Real Life” is a Convenient Fallacy for the Cold and Lazy. (A Featured Post on Brazen Careerist)
I read this post today over at Comma N’ Sentence about excessive online openness and the subsequent superficiality it tends to attract. Laryssa is certainly not the first person to address this issue, (and oddly, several of my online colleagues have of late started to adopt very similar views over the last two months), but she does express it in quite an illustrative, if plain manner in this post.
Her post addresses the angle from the heads side of the coin, if you will. I won’t rehash what she said here. Read her post.
And when you have read it, consider my approach to this issue on the tails side of the same coin. Instead of addressing the fear of commitment, I want to talk about the ease of insensitivity and rudeness.
Since my very first days on the internet, I have been of the mind that online communication ought to consist of just as much decency, respect, and effort as that in which we partake offline. In other words, if you wouldn’t cross a busy highway, scour a store, and seek out the stranger with a certain bumper sticker just so you could say, “fuck you” to their face, don’t do it online. Or if instead of staring blankly and walking away, you would do your best in “real life” to answer someone that politely asked you for assistance at a grocery store, do so online. If your “friends” can count on you to give them a minute in person when they ask for it, have the spine to give it to them online when they ask for it by actually returning texts and emails promptly for a change.
I have been consistently shot down, flammed, trolled, and attacked for expecting such behavior. Dating sites, message boards, chat rooms, emails, Facebook, comments, etc. I am told, (“told” is putting it lightly) “Don’t expect the same treatment online as in ‘real life’ when you talk to people. It’s obviously different.”
And this is the problem.
We get a text. An email. A Facebook message. And despite declarations that all of these technologies can bring us all closer together and make the world smaller, the first advantage we take of such things is generally to ignore them. We don’t have the time or energy right now. With zero effort we can opt to pay no attention to a co-worker’s question, a family member’s complaint, or a friend’s cries for help. “Just turn off a machine and that drama is gone,” I heard one person say. Not that you even have to turn off the machine anymore.
We generally try to avoid drama and unpleasantness everywhere, of course. But the standards that define “drama” and the other things with which we don’t wish to deal are skewed in the social media age. Our tolerance for interaction that isn’t instantly gratifying has gone way down. Many of us have no problem clicking off a cell phone that wakes us up before we are ready. “I’ll deal with that shit later,” we say once we check the sender of the text message. Yet how many of you would, if a friend showed up at your door in distress at 2 in the morning actually close the door on their face, roll back into bed and say, “I’m so not into that drama right now”?
Like Laryssa says, the days of calling a land line or writing a letter required effort. But those days also required some effort and a sense of discomfort if we wanted to blow people off. (At least it did for people who are worth a damn.) But these days, even otherwise “decent” people can just punch a button and decide they are not in the mood to be polite to you. It has become ingrained into our subconscious that to ignore someone who is texting, calling or emailing us is acceptable, even among people who wouldn’t think of just ignoring someone that approached them in person and began to speak, for whatever reasons.
80% of my friends are notorious for this shit, actually. There are people who have not returned any of my messages in two years. Years. People that have never, since having my phone number, actually called me back. They are “busy” or their “life is hectic”.
And mine isn’t?
When people are trying to reach out to us for something, in a sane, respectable manner, we should respond. Especially if they don’t do so very often, like me. People, after all, are what we ought to be investing most of our time in. And it is, ironically, people that are easiest to blow off in the emerging world of social media ubiquity.
Who Do You Love? (A Featured Post on Brazen Careerist)
I think most people must be far more careful with saying “I love you.”
I do not refer merely to romantic love, or eros or whatever the hell you want to call the kissy-kissy kind. I mean any kind of love, for none of them are really as insignificant as we sometimes make them out to be in our society.
There are so many varieties of love that I think it actually becomes easier to make inappropriate use of the word. For if we simply stipulate to ourselves that there are “all kinds of love” and recognize that we feel at least some sort of affinity for another person, we can label it “love” right off, and reap the benefits of expressing that to someone, without putting in the mental effort and the time to determine which type of love it is, or if in fact it is love at all. And when harebrained applications of the term come back to haunt us, we can enjoy the ass-covering convenience of saying, “Well, I didn’t mean that kind of love.”
For some, I imagine this is done with intent. They enjoy the theatrics and the potency of saying to someone, “I love you,” and all of the almost reflexive responses that come about when others hear those three words. (Especially for the very first time from someone.) For even if it is clearly not meant in a romantic fashion, we live in a world so potentially lonely and void of meaning that we tend to latch on to those words in any context. Which of course is a problem in and of itself, as well as yet another reason we all should be far more careful with making the most famous of human declarations.
Yet I am willing to conclude, for now, that it is just as often falsely declared as a result of laziness. We don’t feel like delving into the nature of what we truly mean, and saying something is far easier than proving it through actions anyway. So we slap an “I love you” on something, and think we have done the ultimate favor. We don’t specifically intend to cause trouble or pain, but our carelessness makes such outcomes far more likely. Not unlike firing a gun into the air in celebration. No harm is intended, but it isn’t at all a safe or responsible thing to be doing.
In this speed-of-light, social media age, take the time, for your sake and for the sake of others, to examine how you really feel towards any given individual. Be introspective enough to identify your own feelings before you engage in a potential powder keg of someone else’s. It cannot always be avoided, but certainly we can go a great distance by considering our true feelings in some depth before expressing them.
We really think we love someone who always makes us laugh. Or who has suffered what we are/were suffering. Or who stands up for a principle that we share. And sometimes just being around a person for an extended period of time, such as a classmate or co-worker of many years will make us conclude, incorrectly that our comfort and familiarity are in fact love. But are they?
You might be dealing with admiration. Or respect. Or awe. Gratitude perhaps. Appreciation. Each of them sometimes mixed in with a bit of lust to add to the confusion. In each of these cases we may find ourselves, either in a very somber moment, or in a casual everyday situation telling such a person, “I love you.” But how do you know for sure? We may never be 100% sure at first, but ask yourself some questions:
“What exactly am I feeling? Am I drawn to this whole person, or to an action they took? To one trait they posses? To their viewpoints? To the high level of enjoyment I get out of their company? If I took away any given major aspect of them, would I feel the same?”
And on and on. The point being to decide if you love the entire person. Not that we must love every aspect of the people we love, for we cannot. But certainly we can take the time to ask ourselves if we love more than an aspect of a person. And if we do not, we probably really do not love the person, and should call it something else. We shouldn’t say “I love you,” but instead express our appreciation for that aspect of them to which we feel drawn.
Just because love has many facets, doesn’t mean we are released from the responsibility of treating it with respect. Of understanding its awesome power in any form, and refraining from making reference to it lightly, without thought. The consequences of flippancy can be disastrous, for ourselves, the other person, and, when left to accumulate, the world. (Which I fear we may be seeing nowadays.)
Besides, love is a verb anyway, not a feeling. To love someone in any fashion is to serve them, not posses them. I am being more careful with how often I say it to someone, and trying to take with a grain of salt the times I have been told, “I love you, Ty” until such time as actions back up the words. For when actions back them up, it shows that I wasn’t told out of laziness or confusion, but out of a genuine desire for my betterment, sometimes even at the expense of the other person.
That’s love.
Don’t Always Be Selling. (A Featured Post on Brazen Careerist)
Malcom Forbes once said that he judged a man by how he treats those that can do nothing for him, nor to him.
I know nothing of Malcom Forbes outside of this quotation. But it is more than enough for me to appreciate the way he thought.
Volumes and volumes have been written by Gen-Y on social media about the importance of keeping one’s nose clean. Of remembering our “elevator pitch”. Defining our “personal brand”. Tidying up our cyber finger prints by considering that every move we make will one day be checked by a potential employer. Opening our Facebook to the world, making sure we have “nothing to hide”. Never leaving home without a business card, and printing some up if we don’t have any. About attending cocktail parties to exchange such cards, and about never having lunch alone. About finding a way to “suck it up” if we don’t enjoy those things, because we have to do them anyway. About researching a company and a hiring manager for 50 years so we can adequately fake a personal interest in them during an interview when what we really need and want is a job to pay our bills.
We’re told to always be selling. Networking. Researching. Polishing. Meeting and greeting.
And why? So that we make the right impression; nay the perfect impression on someone because they are a potential employer. Or a potential client. Or a gateway to a better network that might one day provide us access to same.
In other words, to keep up appearances for those who can do something for us or to us.
How weary I sometimes get of it. How plastic it all begins to appear after a time. And how shallow.
Of course, I must include the obligatory section of this post which reminds everyone that I am well aware that one can do all of these things and still be a damn decent fellow. I must also remind the world that I realize these things can sometimes be very important. But the point is, so much is written about the how’s and why’s of doing so for profit. Very little in comparison seems to be written about just plain, straight up decency and professionalism towards people when they can’t yield you anything.
Don’t save your “A Game” for your networks. Don’t spend all of your mental capacity for meticulous research on a potential employer that you probably won’t even be working for anymore five years from now, even if you get hired. Show some polish, class, and dedication even when almost nobody is watching. Not because the people you encounter might secretly be able to help you after all, but because your persona is your persona. You are either refined or you are not. Everything else is just selling a used car as far as I’m concerned.
Ty Unglebower 