And another irritation

A rather gross example

The otherwise admirable Financial Times online offering is being degraded, to my mind, by what seems like an increasing proportion of its stories being offered in video form rather than as text. With this post being triggered by a charity appeal which reached me yesterday coming in video form. I dare say I am showing my age, but I rather like getting my information in text form. Information which I can consume at my own pace, scrolling up and down the text to suit me and my hopefully growing understanding of the matter in hand. I still quite like consuming information from paper, despite the fact that I spend a considerable chunk of my waking day gazing at a computer screen.

I don't really want my messages coming in a noisy, thickly packaged video format which I have to consume at the suppliers' pace. Messages in which presentation and appearance are all too likely to have trumped content. All that effort which has gone into presentation and appearance - largely nugatory to my mind - and which might have been put into crafting a good quality text message.

Video format might be OK when all that is required is the transmission of simple orders from the centre, but hopefully we are still in the business of sharing information and building shared understanding.

PS 1: from where I associate to the thought that a government needs to be better organised than the one we have got if it is to dish out orders that convince, that carry weight - and get obeyed.

PS 2: another strain of this disease is the huge amount of effort that goes into creating fancy web sites, with the effort being concentrated on fancy rather than content. Or put another way, web sites which are designed to entertain and to generate advertisement revenue generating clicks, rather than to inform. With reference 1 being a rather gross example of this sort of thing.

Reference 1: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html.