[419] in Privacy_Forum
[ PRIVACY Forum ] Risks in Hating Web Video
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (privacy@vortex.com)
Fri Jan 16 12:48:20 2009
Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2009 09:26:00 -0800
To: privacy-list@vortex.com
Message-ID: <20090116172600.GC31008@vortex.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Disposition: inline
From: privacy@vortex.com
Reply-To: PRIVACY Forum Digest mailing list <privacy@vortex.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Errors-To: privacy-bounces+privacy-forum=mit.edu@vortex.com
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Greetings. Since I occasionally post audio (and more recently video)
commentaries and other features on the Web, and have been doing so for
a number of years, I've been becoming increasingly concerned about the
phenomenon of what I might call "audio and video media haters" in the
Internet environment. I'm beginning to see some significant related
risks.
Without fail, after each of my posting announcements of an audio or
video presentation, I get e-mail from people that amount to
variations on:
"I refuse to watch video [listen to audio] on the Net. Please make
a text-only version of all your materials available."
Such messages have been particularly notable for this week's
"Stimulus or Ripoff" - "Network Neutrality in 30 Seconds - Part 3"
video segment ( http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000494.html ), which
I announced a couple of days ago.
The reactions to the announcement of this particular video are a
perfect example of my concern. Without the accompanying video track,
and especially its animations, the entire humor of the piece, and even
the key punch line itself, would be completely lost. The short
narration script alone might be interesting to Net Neutrality
intelligentsia, but the piece is designed to try reach a much broader
audience, and the visuals are key to driving home the concepts (to
those who have seen the video, no pun is intended by the term
"driving" in this case!)
There are of course legitimate accessibility concerns with all media.
Unfortunately, I have not found available captioning tools, for example,
to be entirely practical at this stage. In some of my very early audio
efforts, I did make scripts available, and then ran into a wall trying
to note tone of voice (sarcasm, etc.) in a way that would make sense.
Without such notations, I found that some readers were misunderstanding
the intent of the pieces. And while it's certainly possible to write
commentary without tone of voice sarcasm, it can be quite constraining
in an audio presentation.
As the powerful capabilities of video to entertain, inform, explain,
and convince -- video is increasingly a sort of default "coin of the
realm" in many ways on the Internet -- it seems likely that the sorts
of issues and concerns described above will be exacerbated.
I don't claim to possess any magic wand solutions to this, though I
have some relevant ideas. But I do believe we'd be very foolish
to declare such matters as insignificant or unworthy of study.
The ways in which people react to new forms of media have always been
important, sometimes in political contexts that have affected untold
millions of lives over the centuries. Video on the Web will not be
an exception.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@vortex.com or lauren@pfir.org
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
http://www.pfir.org/lauren
Co-Founder, PFIR
- People For Internet Responsibility - http://www.pfir.org
Co-Founder, NNSquad
- Network Neutrality Squad - http://www.nnsquad.org
Founder, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com
Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
_______________________________________________
privacy mailing list
http://lists.vortex.com/mailman/listinfo/privacy
