Editing

So, that Youtube kinda became popular, huh?

As with every new entertainment medium, the rules get changed, while still remaining the same. Just like movie cinematographers need to understand still photography lighting, so people with webcams need to learn how to edit.

Because your videos are insufferable. I don’t need to know about your day before you launch into whatever your video title actually says. I don’t need to hear you fumble over your introduction, hem and haw around the point, or just go into meaningless tangents. And your constant “ums” are distracting. Please edit yourself.

Now, you might accuse me of being a heretic here. After all, I have a podcast that I don’t edit. But, it’s not just me on the podcast. It’s a conversation between several people. And editing conversations is hard. I’m not This American Life – I can’t make an edited conversation sound natural. But I generally think that conversations need less editing in general. We’re used to hearing interactions between multiple people and would miss out on the natural chemistry that exists when several people engage in a dialogue. So, I do think there’s not a lot of call to edit conversations on YouTube. (I question why you uploaded a Google Hangouts video instead of just releasing the audio in podcast form, but whatever.)

But, vlogging is a form of public speaking. And there are rules around public speaking – rules we’ve developed over hundreds of years. Rules that help get your points across in a succinct manner. Just because the form of communication you’ve chosen to engage in is a new one, doesn’t mean all the old rules get thrown out.

There are lots of successful YouTube personalities at this point. Some of them have actual talent. I’m all for the democratization of our entertainment. There are lots of ways that the entertainment industry is broken and putting the power to entertain into everyone’s hands is awesome. But there are also lots of lessons that the entertainment industry learned over its long life and those lessons are being ignored in our new free-form entertainment culture. Please help make your videos watchable – edit yourself.