Information and the Internet.

Having recently said a few words about how the Christian faith is shamelessly manipulated to match indoctrinated American attitudes, I was pleased to see this on my YouTube home page:

It’s impossible to follow Jesus and be a Christian at the same time

Maybe it was intended as clickbait, but since it’s a rare example of something I consider not only axiomatic but transparently so, I won’t complain about this one.

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I’ve noticed something else about YouTube recently. I’ve seen an increasing number of examples of self-professed experts explaining their position on something or other in a simple and rational form of words. And then they repeat that position using different words. And then they repeat it all a second time using different words again, and I find myself thinking ‘but you said all this three minutes ago and three minutes before that.’ I’ve little doubt that it’s a recommended practice – encouraged by Google, no doubt – to drag the video out as long as possible because one of the one of the factors used to consider the ‘value’ of the video is retention. They want to keep people locked onto the video as long as possible because that, or so I’m reliably informed, increases the fee they can charge the advertisers.

This didn’t happen much back in the days when people derived their information from books published by responsible publishers. Good editors would look out for repetition and only allow it if they deemed it genuinely necessary. The world of information availability has changed greatly since the coming of the internet, and not always in a good way. The concept of monetization has changed all that, as it has in most aspects of life.