somebody just sent me a thing about streaming video. theoretically, at first glance, seems like streaming would be a great idea. seems like broadband would be too. but what actually has happened is the web has become a cesspool of garbage as a direct result? but people not familiar with a pre-garbage culture seem to have developed a taste for this stuff? they like what is literally garbage. (not a description of quality so much as things that are disposable, not made well by design,
i think the severe limitations of file size and download speed (what happened to 56k modems? that was nice, just right. these high speed connections are just garbage magnets!? people post anything now.) are actually our good friends. they force us to edit and spend time deciding what really needs to be said, what people may even find interesting. cheap camcorders may have made filming more accessible, but the end result isn't much of an improvement over a tourist showing you a slide show of their 50th wedding anniversary in Niagra. sorry, just riles me up. why can't folks practice with cheap video and just keep it to themselves? not make a dumping ground of the web? why do they like to show people this shit? why do people waste their time/energy looking at so much garbage?
that's just my personal opinion. it's ironic to think not only are all these "improvements" not only not improvements at all, but specifically how they are making the web worse. well, not worse, but like seeing a restaraunt looking for top chefs one day and seeing them with a sign up "Denny's is now hiring!" the next. the switch to Denny's may end up serving the community, but it just makes the place look a lot chinsier. folks subconsciously may be steered toward flourescent lighting because it makes the place look less intimidating, but candle light still has aopeal. Denny's customers probably don't even consider the place as nasty as those who avoid it. People who like how technology is going now, can't be expected to recognize just how tasteless it has become. does the web need to look so tacky to sell? probably.
but that's the Wal•Mart way!
56K was nice
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Type: discussion
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Plasma Studii <[email protected]> wrote: somebody just sent me a thing about streaming video. theoretically, at first glance, seems like streaming would be a great idea. seems like broadband would be too. but what actually has happened is the web has become a cesspool of garbage as a direct result?
Yeah man, lets go back to Ascii art. ;) Seriously though web content has always been in the majority crap. The fact that there is more crap has nothing to do with connection speeds and everything to do with their being more people on the web. More people is a good thing, more crap is an acceptable side effect. What are you suggesting ? Quality police ? You know where to find the things you like, whats the problem ? Surely half the fun of using the web is filtering/discovering the gems amongst the dirt.
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i don't know of a good solution, why i brought it up. but it's like when the rural country-side was being eaten by strip malls. now even cool old buildings in new york have garish mcdonald's logos glowing filling their once grand windows.
not that anything was better or is. you can say a population explosion may result in strip malls too, or think "quality police" is the only way to avoid that phenomenon. but is there a deeper solution? if you look a little harder, it seems to stem from too much being available to too many eager to put their name up somewhere. an endless blank wall and folks handing out easy spray painting instructions.
it's also a little like the people content to wait in 20 minute lines at the post office, because they either never knew or forgot it used to be much more convenient. there also used to be a cold war, and the US joked how Russians always had to wait in lines. my guess is the REAL end to the cold war (which was always a pretty silly grudge match) is that now we have it just as bad.
ASCII art is cool. at 56k though, jpeg/gif images are fine. more severely edited video would be a blessing. pre-90's, there was neat stuff to be found. a handful at most in the years since. it's just a big catalogue now to me. amazon's fine, but what a waste of potential. people got upset years ago when the tore down the old penn station. now new york is really strict about their cool old buildings. (why they couldn't just tear down the WTC when it was losing millions for years, why 9/11 was somebody's miracle).
like bicycles were originally supposed to make getting across town easier. but all that happened is that instantly towns grew in sq miles. not caused by a population explosion per se, but that was definitely the result. without bicycles a town could only get so big. the edges became inconvenient to get to. if that space becomes convenient, towns can grow.
we are greedy like goldfish who grow proportionally to the whatever's available. more speed will never mean more quality, though it's often marketed as if they are be related. but now i'm thinking there's actually another effect, and ultimately bringing us a lot less quality, in a way no one may even notice.
wrote:
>
>
> Plasma Studii <[email protected]> wrote: somebody just sent me
> a thing about streaming video. theoretically, at first glance, seems
> like streaming would be a great idea. seems like broadband would be
> too. but what actually has happened is the web has become a cesspool
> of garbage as a direct result?
>
> Yeah man, lets go back to Ascii art. ;) Seriously though web content
> has always been in the majority crap. The fact that there is more
> crap has nothing to do with connection speeds and everything to do
> with their being more people on the web. More people is a good thing,
> more crap is an acceptable side effect. What are you suggesting ?
> Quality police ? You know where to find the things you like, whats
> the problem ? Surely half the fun of using the web is
> filtering/discovering the gems amongst the dirt.
>
>
>
>
> ———————————
> Play Santa's Celebrity Xmas Party, an exclusive game from Yahoo!
On a side-line – ever heard of this crowd – http://www.deadmalls.com/
Geert Dekkers
http://nznl.com
On Dec 22, 2005, at 5:50 PM, Plasma Studii wrote:
> i don't know of a good solution, why i brought it up. but it's
> like when the rural country-side was being eaten by strip malls.