The Medium Is the Message
Here's a little video that was made to learn to use video production tools. The objective was to see how many of them I could incorporate in a minute without being totally obnoxious.
A number of years ago I was involved with some instructional videos produced in analog mediums for viewing on television monitors. It's interesting that the studio production tools for digital mediums have closely mimicked those for analog production, only now anyone with a $500 computer and a $100 digital camera can become the next Stephen Spielberg ... maybe.
I was thinking the other day of how the news of the day was communicated before the printing press, telegraph, telephone, television and Internet. A messenger ran 26 miles 385 yards from Marathon to Athens to announce that the Greeks had beaten the Persians at the Battle of Marathon. I suppose normal stuff also traveled by foot but at a more leisurely pace in the form of what we would call gossip today. Handwritten letters could be sent somewhat unreliably with someone going from one place to another. And, of course, scribes made expensive copies of books by hand.
Now, gossip and its first cousin, untruths, can be flashed around the world in small fractions of a second in voice messages, emails, digital documents, blogs and videos, all for the price of a connection to the Internet.
I pay Google nothing to use Blogger and YouTube. And, as I publish videos on YouTube I sometimes wonder what the physical limits of storage might be. All I have found is that a video cannot be greater than 100Mb or take longer than 10 minutes to upload. Now, they compress the video down in size (at a loss of some quality thereby), but 100Mb? That's more than enough to store a text copy of "War and Peace" many times over. Indeed, Google now has a project to make digital copies of every book in every library available on the Internet at no cost to the reader.
It boggles the mind.
A number of years ago I was involved with some instructional videos produced in analog mediums for viewing on television monitors. It's interesting that the studio production tools for digital mediums have closely mimicked those for analog production, only now anyone with a $500 computer and a $100 digital camera can become the next Stephen Spielberg ... maybe.
I was thinking the other day of how the news of the day was communicated before the printing press, telegraph, telephone, television and Internet. A messenger ran 26 miles 385 yards from Marathon to Athens to announce that the Greeks had beaten the Persians at the Battle of Marathon. I suppose normal stuff also traveled by foot but at a more leisurely pace in the form of what we would call gossip today. Handwritten letters could be sent somewhat unreliably with someone going from one place to another. And, of course, scribes made expensive copies of books by hand.
Now, gossip and its first cousin, untruths, can be flashed around the world in small fractions of a second in voice messages, emails, digital documents, blogs and videos, all for the price of a connection to the Internet.
I pay Google nothing to use Blogger and YouTube. And, as I publish videos on YouTube I sometimes wonder what the physical limits of storage might be. All I have found is that a video cannot be greater than 100Mb or take longer than 10 minutes to upload. Now, they compress the video down in size (at a loss of some quality thereby), but 100Mb? That's more than enough to store a text copy of "War and Peace" many times over. Indeed, Google now has a project to make digital copies of every book in every library available on the Internet at no cost to the reader.
It boggles the mind.
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