Web video content is gradually being lobotomized. Years ago it was foreseen that vertical video would be ruinous to viewing conditions. But it is not the aspect ratio alone that has sent web video spiraling down the pit of eternal stupidity. The rise of short form videos catering to zoombies with blown out dopamine receptors has accelerated the decay beyond anything I could have imagined. There are a few factors at play in this.
Linear graphical video editors appear to be absent or impractical on mobile prisons. My observations of mobile-produced edits suggest that mobile zombies are simply offered a select palette of effects that apply in full over the entire video. “Filters”. Among the results are videos which completely remove the original audio to overlay the uploader’s favorite song, an ailment that we had only just recovered from over the last decade and a half (almost as inexcusable as uploading slide shows to Gootube). And videos with distortion effects obscuring the subject or plastered with emoticons and graphics. Fast cuts (technical events, as described in Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television) to retain the viewer’s ADHD attention.
But I suppose my major gripes are with the toxic waste shat out by tiktok. In no particular order;
Uploaders socialized like monkeys to begin their video immediately into a dialogue as though you’ve been dropped into the middle of a long conversation with a close acquaintance. How psychotic. It reads to me as the product of social engineering. The maneuvering of tiktok as one’s close “friend”.
Realtime subtitle transcriptions. One may be so hopelessly addicted that they must watch videos while riding the subway or while having a meal out where it is difficult to utilize audio. But instead of using subtitle files proper, tiktok have decided it better to encode subtitles right into the video itself where it cannot be disabled. To viewers using a proper arrangement where audio is available, they serve only to distract. To further clutter the visual subjects with yet more crap. Are mobile users so dependent that they must have subs at all times? And not even normal subs, but a kind developed for rapid, hypnotic, lazy reading?
Needless self-inserts.
Most short form videos do not even merit a visual component at all. So often they consist of somebody filming themselves in a car, delivering a dialogue that could have simply been conveyed as text. Remember, most phone zombies are just reading subs anyway. Or at least they could be conveyed as a voice over. Mostly this seems to serve the newly feminized internet. Narcissists can relish their own image and exploit human psychology to draw greater attention to their otherwise mediocre content.
Vapid synthetic speech. It’s as though the synthetic voice is designed to sound like the same half wits they seek to cater to.
The omission of context. Clipping anything down to fit within a minute’s runtime translates into the loss of underlying information and contextual meaning. No, I am not interested in watching just a fifteen second exchange extracted from a debate.
It is increasingly becoming difficult to avoid this intellectually stunted format. Links that people share being inconspicuous .mp4 files. And, more often, longer form video uploaders are including mobile format clips in their works, instead of chasing down the primary source footage. I do not want to see braindead zoombies talking about a subject matter when that subject matter can instead be viewed directly. So we’ve returned to the same problem that was so prevalent on boomer television news. A steady stream of low quality garbage designed to hold the focus of sub-95 IQ normies.
On the technical end, I am investigating the feasibility of using mpv to probe video links for aspect ratio and duration properties from which to automate the blocking of probable mobile videos. Higher effort would be demanded for the writing of a browser extension to do the same in Firefox
On the non-technical, it may be worth considering dropping certain groups and individuals from one’s online regiment. If an acquaintance or familiar uploader is sharing out mobile format trash, it is an indicator that they have surrendured a part of their soul to the botnet, fondling their way through the muck of tiktok and TXitter. Owners of online hangouts might serve their communities well by disincentivising the uploading or sharing of short form videos featuring oversocialized talking heads.
Will short form ADHD video retire as it had once done following the era of Vine, a similar affliction of millennial flavored braindeadery? The up and coming generation’s total exclusive usage of mobile devices can be our forecast. The population’s computer literacy is going to plunge to depths never before seen. Likely, we will be left yearning even for the days of the baby boomers, replete with their Nigerian princes and with their twelve rows of freeware toolbars.
The trends are already becoming evident. Short form video is being used in place of web search. Users would rather be spoken to than have to read paragraphs of text. Admittedly, humans are creatures of storytelling around the fire. They would more readily digest a feed of mobile clips ranked accoring to the trove of data assembled about them by the surveillance machine.