Make - Don't Consume

Who would have thought that Susan Boyle would represent so many possibilities for metaphor and example. The YouTube video that I linked to previously is dead - taken down by the poster. Well that's my impression of YouTube. It's quick and easy, but not to be counted on over time. It's unreliable as a reference or repository and for all of it's pretense at being able to show HD, most of it is technically inferior. 

So now the remaining Susan Boyle videos that I can find are not up to my standard. They either don't show all of the footage (you miss the full story - I hate that) or they have bad audio (why post a music video with sucky audio?) or it's the wrong format (16:9 images squished down to 4:3 - again why do that?). 

I saw someone on CNN last night commenting on the remarkable number of hits her video has generated - about 50 million (I had this at 500 million at first, then I doubted that number after a while and changed it, but the one that I'm linking to now already has over 50 million - so who knows?) That's a lot, but it's even a little more amazing because it all seems so ad hoc and kludged together. That must be an aggregated number combining all of the versions of her performance.

So what's the point to all of this. I guess this is just more of a reflection on the way YouTube has penetrated our world. It's an easy way to show ourselves work, but it's also too off the cuff, unreliable, and arbitrary. If we need to post a video to show to each other we need to control that ourselves, not rely on a middleman to do the heavy lifting, because later, it's just not there. Don't be a consumer, be a maker - own and control your work.

gunther