No, I haven’t been transported back to 1981 and the introduction of MTV (although I’m now having nice flashbacks of Duran Duran videos). It’s merely a commentary on how pervasive videos have become. Irritatingly so, in my opinion. There was a time when you could read (OMG… read) a news article online. Now, you get a video and you’re damn lucky if you get a synopsis of what’s contained in the story.
This can be annoying to me as a consumer/user/customer, because it takes me much less time to read a story than listen to it, and there are a number of times I’m just in no position to have volume.
One day, perhaps they’ll beam the videos into our brains. Or play them directly on our retinas. That would be a lot easier for me as an end user. But then I think about what I go through at work and the thought scares the crap out of me.
One huge facet of my day job involves posting videos to our company website. Enabling video viewing on multiple browsers, some with flash, some with HTML5, and ensuring compatibility with two content management systems is a nightmare. Browser updates, firewall setting changes or file conversion failure can topple the whole house of cards. The amount of jury-rigging I do is phenomenal.
In the early days of “direct beaming technology for everyone”, people like me might cause an awful lot of brain damage. Or retinal scarring. But that’s kind of a cool plot bunny, isn’t it? Just you wait… something like that’s going to show up in one of my stories. Before they come up with that technology for real and I have to somehow make it work… by trial and error.
The one constant where technology is concerned is that it will run amock! Reading your post made me think of Total Recall. Sure, implant memories in my brain. No problemo.
LOL – “no problemo”. Yeah, then next comes “oops, I don’t know why that didn’t work…”