Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Cyprus Mail has an interesting article on the rising role and side effects of citizen journalism.

Throughout the social media – from Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and YouTube – photos and film are posted every minute that breach codes of conduct, laws of copyright, personal privacy and government laws. From pornography to celebrity parties, from inside Guatanemo Bay to soldiers on the frontline telling it how it really is: images are escaping censorship and regulation.

I think that censorship is not an option anymore, at least in global scope.  Cameras are everywhere – cheap semi-professional equipment, camcorders, webcams built-in into every notebook, mobile phones, etc.  Also, free or cheap Internet access is pretty much everywhere.  And on top of that, technology got really simple – one doesn’t need a Computer Science degree and years of experience to capture a video, upload it to a social network and share it with the rest of the world.

And when the censorship option is gone, the only reasonable option that I can think of is education.  If governments, companies, parents, societies, etc. will start educating people, focusing on the “good” instead  of “bad”, if appreciating conducts, laws, and ethics will be encouraged, then we’ll see more of the “better” content.  Of course, nothing will prevent us from a few “bad apples”, but once the appropriate values will be set, a lot of people will follow.

In some sense, this issue is similar to tobacco smoking and alcohol consumption.   While there are certain legal issues – licensing, age limits, advertising, driving, etc – the major control over population’s behavior in regards to tobacco and alcohol is, IMHO, done via education.  It is when you show people over and over again what are consequences of tobacco smoking and alcohol abuse, when you educate them on the side effects, and so on and so forth, that’s when they start thinking and reacting in the way that you would want them to think and react.

Of course, legal consequences can be implemented to some degree.  For example, for showing the moment of death and such.  But those would be very difficult to enforce, due to the global nature of the Internet, digital media, and such.

Scobleizer believes in longer videos:

Advertisers also will pay a lot higher rates for those long-form ads.

Why?

Because someone who’ll watch a 30-minute video is HIGHLY ENGAGED. They are far more likely to become a customer than someone who just watches a two-minute entertaining video.

I think that “video” is too broad for this topic.  To consider only educational and entertainment videos, I see a huge difference.  I don’t believe that entertainment videos will become longer.   Entertainment is a sort of thing that doesn’t have to go either deep or long.  Thus it doesn’t need large chunks of time.  Educational video is a totally other story.  While there are many “howto” type of videos, many topics require more than 5 minutes to explain.  Take Google Tech Talks for example.  They are pretty popular and each one takes about an hour.

There is also this factor of production costs.  It’s much harder to create 60 minutes of high quality (and I don’t mean pixels or bytes) video material, than 10 minutes.  Or 5.  Filmmakers know that.  And the audience knows that.   While less and less filmmakers will risk it, and more and more of those who do risk it will produce crapy long videos, the audience will learn the benefit of a short video and will be more inclined into choosing shorter formats.

However, since I am not at all involved in any video production or distrubtion, I might be totally wrong on this.  Judging purely from my own experience.  And my own experience mostly comes from YouTube and Google Video.

I really enjoyed this interview of Mike James, done by Terry Heaton.  Simple, direct, and to the point.  Some things discussed are obvious to anyone with a common sense.  Others are not so.   Here are a couple of quotes to get you started.

Television news (if you believe it is a form of journalism) has the ability…the responsibility…to capture and preserve the moments, the events, that pass through our daily lives. Instead, it has fallen back on trivial weepies and frothy feel-goods, on medical “studies” and video news releases, or political spin and opinionated shoutfests, hypothesis, rumor, and supposition. TV news is no longer in charge of itself. It deserves to be shot at sunrise.

Bloggers are banging at the door of reality. But there are too many of them. They are unfocused. Too wild-eyed. Too unconsidered. And they fade away with time. The internet is generations away from fulfilling its promise. Bloggers have found limited success only because mass media has failed so miserably.