The Anti-Social Media

We all know how much I hate video blogging.

But for the safety of everyone: Video bloggers,  stop filming video blogs in your car while you are driving.

How long will it be until we lose a blogger because they were distracted behind the wheel? We’ve lost somany people in accidents caused by people talking on their cell phone, let alone using it as a camera to film their latest “insight.”

Your idea can wait until you get to your destination and aren’t being a hazard to the safety of others. Whatever you want to publish isn’t that revolutionary that it has to be filmed and published this very moment while you’re crusing at 60 miles per hour down the highway in rush hour traffic.

Besides, filming on the road is distracting to the audience. The camera shakes. There are all sorts of visuals outside of the window passing by that are more interesting than you. You can’t control lighting, and you look washed out and terrible.

I’m not saying that your video blog needs to be so over produced it’s slippery with a nice gloss, but you should care enough to make yourself look presentable. And you don’t look presentable after a long day in the office while you’re sitting in traffic in a car with crappy air conditioning.

Take your idea for your video blog, make a note of the idea, and drive safely home.  Fix yourself up in front of a mirror, and then get to work. You’ll look better, you won’t be stressed by trying to drive, and you won’t be endangering every person on your commute.

I have a not so secret obsession with Rebecca Black’s Friday.  It’s so bad, it’s hilarious to me. What’s even more hilarious are the hundreds of amazing and creative parodies and variations that people put together.

So, while I was looking around for more  random crap related to the Friday video, I found Benni Cinkle.

Benni is the girl in pink who dances awkwardly in the Friday video. She’s become something of a viral meme herself because the shot in the video is so bad and weird. However, instead of hiding away and hoping that she can pass into anonymity, she has embraced her awkwardness, and has built a better personal brand than you.

Benni has more Twitter followers than you. She also has more Facebook Fans, more YouTube subscribers, and more Tumblr followers. Her Klout score is even better than yours and all she did was dance in a video for a total of 5 seconds.

You can work as hard as you want to become an influencer and thought leader. You can put yourself out there daily, and tweet, comment, and blog all the damn time. But there is a certain level of serendipity and luck that goes into becoming an online celebrity that is outside of your control. You can’t force people to make you go viral. You can’t make people find you entertaining or insightful. The most you can do is keep working hard and hope your efforts pay off.

Or maybe start dancing badly in other people’s videos and hope it goes viral. Both have pretty much the same shot at internet celebrity at this point anyways.

Giving anyone the ability to publish anything has both its merits and perils. On one hand, we are able to share more information than ever before, whether in the form of videos, podcasts, or the written word. We can learn and laugh together faster than ever before.

It’s also given us such horrible, horrible things as MySpace, AOL, and the code spawned from Satan know as Bonzi Buddy.

Ladies and gentleman, I present to you an abomination from the third circle of internet hell. The haul video.

(If you can’t see the video, you’re really not missing anything. If you want to torture yourself, click here to watch it on YouTube. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

In a haul video, a person shows off his/her purchases in an overly long, mindless ramble. There is no real critique of the product, because typically the person shooting the video bought the product with his or her own money and people buy things they like.

Most haul videos go on for ten minutes. If you’re attempting to watch the video above, notice how fast she talks, and how little is actually said. I watched four of these to research for this post, and I’m really killing myself for losing forty minutes of my life watching these.

I don’t get the appeal of these videos at all. To me, they scream, “I’m a shameless consumer whore.” It’s disgusting. If there was any review of the products at all, I’d get it. If there was even the slightest hint of visual narrative, I’d get it it. But these things don’t exist when someone is just talking to the camera and holding things up.

What’s crazy is how popular these videos are. The YouTuber I’ve featured above, juicystar07, has over a half million subscribers and so far, users watched her videos over one hundred million times. Because of this ridiculous popularity, many of these YouTubers become YouTube partners, which pays them based on the views. That money can go into buying more stuff for hauls, which makes for more videos, which pays them more money, and so on.

Am I the only person disgusted by this cycle of blatant consumerism? Whatever happened to describing the product and telling people if it’s any good? Why do we have to show off everything we’ve purchased from a bottle of contact solution to a tube of lip gloss? I feel like I’m going to be sick.

And next time I go shopping, I’m making a haul video. I’m sure everyone wants to see my next kitty litter haul.

Last week I asserted that no one wants to watch you talk to your webcam because you’re not telling a compelling audio/visual story. Need an example? Just watch any video book review. I filmed a book review myself, and, in retrospect, I hate myself for it.

Typically, a video book review involves the blogger sitting somewhere totally boring and wearing an outfit that screams, “I don’t care what I look like!” to the entire internet.  It then goes into this three step process:

1. The blogger states his/her name, his/her blog name for the one unfamiliar person who somehow stumbled their poor self onto the video, and the book they will review.
2. The blogger proceeds to ramble with no script or points to make as they “review” the book for the next one and half to three minutes. The longer it goes on, the more likely you are to wonder things like, “Why am I watching this?” “Why is the guy filming this in his car” or “Is he homeless? I bet he’s homeless dressed like that.”
3. The blogger closes by saying buy the book (with their Amazon Affiliate link below), and then says their name and blog again because at this point you’ll be waking up from a short nap.

These video book reviews have no strong visual images to show off. Do you want to show people your notes? The cool illustrations? The publisher’s choice of an excellent font? It’s not like there aren’t pictures of this book online. Anything you’re showing in a video is not why people read books.

The audience who is going to go buy a book is not the type that will watch someone review it. They want to know about the content of the book. Is it written well? Is it entertaining or very dry? Is it highly technical or easy to get into? They want to read your favorite excerpts of the book. They want to know what you loved and hated. They want to taste the wordplay the author has committed to the page, not watch you ramble until you think the video is long enough.

Just like you cannot judge a book by its cover, your video does nothing to describe the actual contents of the book. Take the time to write an actual review with actual content, not just whatever spills out of your mouth for three minutes. It will be infinitely better, and no one will know that you were wearing a teal blazer with shoulder pads.

And if you’re dying to know how to review a book on video, talk to Levar Burton and Reading Rainbow. That’s how you get someone to share a book with audio and visual storytelling.

I’m sick of watching terrible online videos, I’m sick of people who talk at their webcam, and I’m sick of people who film random aspects of their life half heartedly. There’s more to video than just making it and puking it onto YouTube.

If you want people to watch your YouTube videos, you need to do more than just make a video. You may think you’re the bees knees talking to your fancy built-in webcam, but unfortunately you just aren’t that beautiful or interesting to make me watch you talk to your computer. Likewise, unless you can pull of some pretty awesome trick, filming yourself in the day to day isn’t that interesting.

Making a great video is like writing a good blog post. You have to consider the entire composition of the video, what it will look like, how it sounds, how it will flow together, who it’s aimed at, and where you will host it. You need to find the arc of the story. It needs to be visually interesting. Otherwise, why are you making a video with a visual aspect?

Just like blogging, you’re not going to get it perfect every time. You need to work your ass off to make people actually care. With over 35 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube a minute, you’ve got to stand out and market that video, or people won’t care to find it on their own.

Make me care. Put some heart into your video.

And for the love all that’s beautiful, stop staring at your webcam.