If you've been on Facebook for a while, you've probably survived the multiple informational fads that have come and gone, each more obnoxious as the last. From "Share this post 100,000 times so this child can receive surgery" to the invention of clickbait by the evil geniuses at Upworthy (Though this at least spawned a worthy and by itself entertaining parody that is Clickhole), companies are permanently on a search for how the create the most viral content for all of our short attention spans.
The latest spawn of the social media machine is letterbox videos. These are presented in a square resolution so you don't miss out on any of the action if you're holding your phone vertically, completely subtitled so you don't have to be wearing headphones or at home to absorb their unholy power, and generally short so you don't get bored. What's wrong with that then? Well, these annoying little buggers of online content generally come in two forms which we'll call " "news" " and "...and the results are shocking."
" "news" " is spearheaded mostly by NowThis, and features mostly news slanted extremely in one political direction in short snippets and generally poorly explained. This is a result of two of the fundamental aspects of these letterbox videos: their desired short length and their reliance on visual communication which can only move so much information at a time when trying to move at a speed everyone can comprehend that information at (We're all too damn lazy to want to pause to read something we're watching on Facebook). With the shorter length, much of the important visual information is cut out to fit into a bit sized video package.
When you're the kind of news organization that wants to make people think of something a certain way, you get to relish in the ability to channel the internet's short attention span into a weapon to cut out important context regarding what people say or details about an event or accident. What results is how NowThis rose to power, cutting parts of Trump campaign speeches to make him seem more of a racist violent oaf than he was (which is actually an impressive feat in hindsight). These videos then had their "share" buttons clicked into oblivion by people who wanted to make sure all their friends would hear what the crazy Republican candidate was saying so they could forget about it in an hour when the new [Insert popular artist here] album came out.
From the annoyingly harmful, we move to the just plain annoying, the super clickbaity "cool product" or "look at this science" videos that basically follow the same format:
1) Reuse the same footage over and over again at slightly different speeds.
2) The phrase "will shock you" MUST appear in the second shot.
3) No more than 6 words in a subtitle set.
4) Milk every subtitle set for what its worth.
5) Give no information on where one can find out more about what the video's showing, you already got the view.
What people want to consume and share is up to them, my own personal annoyances aside. All I ask from consumers of....well, we'll call it "thrifty news," is to watch these 30 second news digests with the knowledge that there are very few political news stories that can be funnelled into a format that small and not have something important be missed.
