video – The Homebound Symphony

April 1, 2023

Teens on screens: Life online for children and young adults revealed – Ofcom:

This year also saw the rise of ‘split-screening’. Split-screen social media posts allow children to watch more than one short-form video simultaneously, on a single-screen, side-by-side or stacked on top of one another. This appears to be a progression of the ‘multi-screening’ behaviours seen in previous research waves, where children reported difficulties focusing on one screen-based activity at a time.

Distinctions needed here: There is a difference between genuinely watching “more than one short-form video simultaneously” and merely having more than one short-form video on one’s screen at a given time. I seriously doubt that it is possible for any human being to watch two videos at the same time; the best we can do, I suspect, is to switch rapidly between two videos, and a good deal of research indicates that we’re not good at doing even that. Every time our attention switches to one information source we cease to attend to the other.

June 14, 2022

artisans on video

Just as there are an infinite number of reasons to seek God in prayer, so there are an infinite number of reasons to check out YouTube. But for me YouTube is primarily a place of contemplation. I love the YouTube channels that help me relax – even, in the best possible circumstance, reach a Zen-like stage of contemplative peace. For the last year or so I have primarily been fascinated by videos of train journeys – the ones from Britain’s National Rail are especially compelling. I watch the Scottish Highlands pass by; my heart rate slows; my blood pressure lowers. It’s great.

But lately I have discovered another Zen domain of YouTube: the world of guitar repair and restoration. Apparently I’m not the only one: many guitar-repair videos specify that they have no narration: you just watch some master craftsman at work, and all you hear is the sound of a fine-grained file or a brush sweeping a lovely oil finish over the body of a guitar. You watch something like the Andy Bass and Guitar channel and it’s like looking at a de la Tour, only with shellac and scrapers.

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You can also find stories of intrigue. For instance, take a look at this one, in which another master craftsman is charged with the task of repairing and restoring a Gibson Les Paul guitar from 1958 — but without making any of the repairs look new. It’s especially cool when you see the guy distressing a part of the guitar he has just repaired to give it a look consistent with the beaten-up, well-used character of everything else on the instrument.

There are several subgenres of restoration: Many videos feature expensive guitars — there are more Martins than anything else — but more down my alley is the work of Gabriele Réti, who likes to restore guitars found in the trash.

And then: the multi-part restoration of a 1902 guitar by Carlos at Anjuda Guitars, a luthier shop in Madrid. A story still in process. There have been four acts so far, interesting but not dramatic at first — and then at the beginning of the third part tragedy suddenly threatens: a humidifier has kicked into overdrive and instead of preserving the old dried wood of this ancient instrument makes it fall apart. But … irreparably? The tension! The suspense! Carlos’s future as a luthier is at stake. It’s only as the third installment goes along that you discover that Carlos may actually be equal to this great task, a feeling that grows in strength with the fourth installment.

There’s a great moment in the third video when Carlos decides that he has to repair one of the guitar’s internal braces, but decides to use mahogany rather than the original cedar, because he wants to provide clear evidence, for future owners, that a later repair has happened. He wants to create layers of history in this guitar! Carlos is an artist with a conscience.

But will he be able to complete his task? Alas, we don’t yet know. We live in tense wonderment. Every day I go back to check to see whether there is a new installment.

So it turns out that there are two sides to guitar-restoration YouTube: the contemplative side, comprised of the sorts of videos you go to when you are in need of relaxation; but then you can also find suspense, a tightrope walk. Both sides are great.

February 16, 2022

the low bar

An excellent post by John Siracusa (a) outlining the most elementary features that the UI of any video-streaming service should have and (b) showing how rarely (if ever) the existing services meet that low bar. This is something that I think about almost every day: How absolutely incompetent the coding is of the streaming services I use. And in my experience music services are almost as bad.

(Apple’s purchase of Primephonic last year gave me a tiny bit of hope that I’d eventually have an app that allows me to listen to classical music without, for instance, having to deal with truncated and hence incomprehensible track listings for classical music — but I’m still waiting for Apple’s version of the service to be released, and am not confident that it ever will be.)

More generally, it seems to me that UI design in software has been getting worse over the past decade, and I wonder why that is. For instance, Amazon’s Kindle software, on every platform, is buggy, and seems increasingly to be focused more on trying to sell me books than on making my reading experience a good one. Yet another reason — there are several — why I’ve almost completely stopped buying Kindle books, though I still use the device for reading, e.g., Project Gutenberg books. But confusing or inappropriate UI design is not solely the province of Amazon — it seems to be becoming endemic. That’s impressionistic and anecdotal, to be sure; if I weren’t preoccupied by other things I’d try to support my claim. But hey, just read Siracusa’s excellent post.

June 15, 2021

Betjeman & Burnham

You probably don’t expect to see an essay that links John Betjeman and Bo Burnham. I certainly didn’t expect to write one, but I did.

When I first came across Bo Burnham’s videos, several years ago now, I didn’t care for them at all. I thought he was childishly eager to pluck all the lowest-hanging comic-satirical fruit, and was all too eager to flatter the sensibilities of his audience. So I stopped paying attention to what he was doing. But people were praising his new Netflix special so extravagantly that I had to check it out, if only so I could say how wrong everyone is.

Instead, I loved it. I think it is a tremendously successful and genuinely significant work of art. I keep thinking: I’m having this reaction to a Bo Burnham show?? And yeah, I am.