Multimedia? Get off my lawn!

[shadowspar]

Maybe it's because I'm getting old and cranky; maybe it's the surfacing of impulsivity that I didn't feel I had, but -- as of late, I'm finding I have very, very little patience for screencasts, presentations, podcasts, and the like, unless they are very, very on-point vis-a-vis something I'm interested in at the moment.

I can read something like 450 words per minute. I'm not going to sit through 100-150wpm speech for very long to figure out if I'm interested in what's being said, especially if I can find the topic explained better elsewhere in text.

People in the tech world seem increasingly wont to use multimedia as the primary or even sole form of documentation for everything from software libraries to consumer websites, a practice of which I am not enamoured. skud wrote up an excellent blurb about such things over in the growstuff wiki.

Comments

[switterbeet]

I'm actually trending more towards audio-video lately. But this is largely because I can process it in "background" mode while doing other tedious tasks. Or if I really enjoy the presenter (like the vlogbrothers).

But yar, for documentation purposes... that's not so helpful!