RSS feedWhen I put together my Five Minute Matrix, I was expecting perhaps a fair amount of traffic to my site, or at least to the Internet Archive where it is hosted. This ended up not being the case, which is a mixed blessing.
Today, almost two months later, I went off looking for links back to my post, and I stumbled across several video aggregation sites hosting the “Five-Minute Matrix”. Problem is, it is not the original video I created, but a low quality low fps flash file. That’s right, flash, Macromedia’s proprietary format. I hate flash, with a passion. Not only is the quality of the new file bad, but the post on a site called IFILM (which I refuse to link to) includes the following drivel:
The best parts of The Matrix are boiled down to one easy-to-digest 5-minute highlight reel.
Aside from the fact that it is not a highlight reel (it is a summary of the key plot points), it makes no reference to the original video, no reference to my site which includes the plot breakdown (which I thought would be interesting for fans of The Matrix), no longer contains my Creative Commons licensing wrapper, and does not make any reference to who converted it or even uploaded it their site.
An additional problem is that as a standalone video, it is in breach of the copyright of the original The Matrix film. Only in context with my original educational post, is it arguably legal.
However the interesting part, and the point of this post, is that this identifies yet again the problem with aggregated microcontent on the Internet. While both the textual plot summary and the video may be viewed separately, it is only together do they form the original post. Text and video microcontent, aggregated via hyperlinks to form a single entity.
Unfortunately, search engines, and the vast number of video aggregators now popping up, care not about context or the construction of content from microcontent, but simply suck up bits of text and media and dump them into a single almost useless voluminous repository.
So why would someone convert my QuickTime file to flash, and not include some reference to my original textual post? Ignorance and apathy. Welcome to the Internet.
Suffice to say, the upload to IFILM has had almost 10,000 views, whereas my original has only had 300. Distribution. Go figure.
Which brings me to IFILM. Now owned by MTV, the site refuses to let me add a comment to the converted video, unless I sign up as a user, which I will not do. Also, any searches in Google for IFILM videos, will not actually cache in google, due to their advertising. Search for five minute matrix and click on the Cached link for the result from IFILM, and you’ll end up in an infinite loop of redirects. Talk about bad design. And of course you’ll notice that the IFILM version is now the top search result as well.
IFILM and sites of their ilk, are not only making organising structured content on the Internet difficult, but are actually causing much of the problems to begin with, by not providing a way to link text, video and other content together, or by not policing or designing a UI which makes it easier to do so. You gotta love mass consumption of and for the lowest common denominator. Something I had hoped would distinguish the Internet from traditional old style media like television.
Around Christmas time, I posted the 12 days of Christmas, 12 videos one for each verse of the song of the same name. Some were shortened slightly due to long bridges between some verses, and there were cross references between each episode which may not have been noticed if watched out of sequence. Anyway, here’s the full version of the song. This is also one of the problems with using reduced frame rates, as the original 15 fps now becomes 15 fps with duplicate subsequent frames, or effectively 7.5 fps. As you probably know, I don’t keep masters of daily video blog posts.
Why am I posting it now? Because I’m really busy with work, and haven’t had time to do any video recently. Hopefully next week I’ll be back to normal.
In Lives on hold, I wrote about how photographs from the early days of photography, were posed, and gave up little about the people contained within. Andreas unfortunately interpreted this as meaning video is the first medium to capture the everyday, which is unfortunate, and certainly not what I meant.
Take, for example, the following photo, of a public demonstration against child labour (from the Library of Congress), probably taken on 1st May 1909. In what should be a serious concern for the protestors (child labour), against the backdrop of a rather important day of demonstration (Labour day), the two women look happy, perhaps proud, while at least three people are more interested in the fact that a photo is being taken than anything else. Only one person, a small boy at the front, perhaps exposes his real emotion, unaffected by the presence of the camera. While this is a snapshot of time, and shows some real people in real historical clothing, that’s about all it shows. It is a snapshot of a moment, but the moment that is captured is “several people emotionally affected by the presence of a camera”.
Much like measurement in quantum mechanics, most photos of this period are affected by the presence of the camera, with most people either posing emotionally neutral, or having their emotions affected by the act of “capturing the moment”. This in effect creates a false impression or representation of the moment.
Andreas suggested The difference [between photography and video] is simply that the photography freezes a blink of an eye in time, while the video records a series of blinks. This is of course technically accurate, but again not what I was referring to in my original post.
My point is that early photography is more posed and more a false impression of real life, because the camera generally affects people in the shot. Thus most photos of people of that time are distorted both emotionally and structurally, because the camera was a fascinating new invention. That tradition has continued to today, in that people still change their emotional and postural state whenever a still camera is nearby.
Video is generally ignored by people when they are the subject of it, or if not, at least the series of blinks [of an eye] do show moments of real emotion in a real moment of time. With photography, we as subjects still tend, completely out of habbit, to pose emotionally neutral or unrealistically happy, whenever we see ourselves being photographed. My family photo album is full of me smiling away throughout my life, when generally, my personal experience is much more the opposite. I’m not saying that still photos are posed and that video is not, but that video has more opportunity to capture people snapping out of their put on photographic poses.
That is what I meant by my original post.
Now, not only does the presence of a measuring device (the camera) affect the measurement (the photo), but the use of black and white (and sepia) as the display medium, also gives us a distorted view of reality. Colourised versions of black and white films show people wearing an array of multicoloured suits. Did the restoration technicians research the actual colours, or did they simply choose whichever colour they thought would look good? In black and white photos, we assume that people of the 1930s all wore grey. Did they? Was their world such a depressive grey wash, or has the emotion of The Depression coloured (sic) our perception of what life was really like at that time? The video enclosed with this post could be perceived as a dark and forboding ocean on an alien world, which is not exactly the impression that the residents of Bawley Point would like to give prospective visitors to their quite beautiful surrounding beaches.
Will we ever be able to preserve a snapshot of time, independent of the affect of the camera? Perhaps not, but the ubiquity of the video camera, and its ability to capture a series of blinks, will come a long way toward betraying false posing and should portray real people doing real things with real emotion. It is not black and white (sic), but it does give us a better opportunity than the still image camera.
Malcolm and Singleton’s mexican standoff. Also the last cat video I’ll be doing for a while, as the other cats in the street have gone on strike over the favouritism I’ve recently been showing to Malcolm. They say he’s only doing it out of sympathy.
Visuals from Bawley Point, audio from a 1960s Sydney peace march. For whom is it high tide?
Malcolm is a stray.
Malcolm lives in the next street.
Malcolm gets looked after by the lady at number 49.
Malcolm picks on the other cats in the street.
Malcolm only has three legs.