NY Times: On YouTube Channels, Whiff of TV Grows Stronger
The shortness and vast abundance of videos, along with the easy but largely random nature of navigation among them, make YouTube an oddly static, timeless experience, no matter how quickly you click from one video to the next. Its channels are video archives, not places where one show follows another.
Watching television may be an equally stationary activity, but the rigid organization of its offerings (and their relatively manageable number) give the experience, even when time-delayed, a temporality that YouTube lacks. Watching television feels like making progress, even if it’s toward no worthwhile goal.
Maybe I just watch television differently but I feel as though television is following the archival format as has been for years. I rarely sit and watch television all day, or go for that “temporality”. Is it me, is it the Internet generation or what? I go for specifics, to watch a specific programme and when it’s done I either try to find other episodes of that programme or a different programme or I turn it off. I just think this is a pretty conservative perspective on programme-viewing habits and the temporality of television.
But then again I’m editing Chapter Three and Chapter Three is a bitch full of simulacra so I’m kind of hanging out on abstract planes here. Love that they pushed SciShow though, SciShow is fab.
