It only takes me a couple of seconds to realize that the YouTube video I just watched wasn’t as entertaining as I’d hoped. The hit has been registered and the “uploader” has received credit for something cleverly named and yet lacking any real content. Their 3 minute compilation video of horses, cats, aliens, conspiracy theory or fails; will yet receive a bunch more hits before something actually entertaining knocks it of the Most Viewed Today list. We are all easily trapped by the deceptive title, “Star Trek and its parallels to human behaviour”.
It only takes a thousand or so hits for a content uploader to make money from the stupid and pointless ads that Google attaches the content, and thats all they really want. It annoys me that other more ‘legitimate’ content creators are forever struggling to created new and clever skits, hoping to retain and to attract new subscribers, all the while fighting this kind of ‘cut and copy’ uploader for 3 minutes of my time.
It seems to me that 3 minutes is about all they can get. Our attention spans must be pretty short, possibly from all that channel surfing on the 1920′s invention the Television. We’ll watch 15 minutes of a television program we find entertaining then during the commercials we hope to find something else on another channel equally as entertaining, something that will fill the 3 minutes until the original show comes back on. Disgustingly we spend 2 minutes jumping channels until something that looks good, and isn’t a commercial grabs our attention. We watch it for 2 minutes hoping it satisfies, and maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t, but we find ourselves going back to find the thing we where watching before only to realize, we’ve missed key dialog and the plot or ending is missed.
Likewise we’ll catch the end of a song on the radio (an invention of the 1910′s) and wait endlessly for it to be played again . We’ll find that after 2 hours you’ve heard the same a second time but that 3 minutes was all we were looking for yet we listen to a bunch more of 3 minute songs and 3 minute ad breaks and 3 minute interruption by the announcers to get it. In the old days anyway we’d go out and sing the song to some record shop owner hoping they’d know the tune, but today we use apps on the smart phones to listen for us and tell us the song. All so we can hear it again without having to wait through someone elses 3 minutes of ill conceived drivel.
Clearly entertainment is found in 3 minute increments.
