I've been thinking a lot about this problem video reviewers are dealing with regarding spurious copyright takedowns and the like, which I gather through general twiiter osmosis is coming to some kind of a head today/tomorrow (though, since the issue doesn't affect my own work and I actually put great effort into not being exposed to anything political, I only have the vaguest sort of knowledge of what the aforementioned head it's coming to might entail).



While I sympathize immensely with the video reviewers, especially TheMysteriousMrEnter and MusicalHell (which,to be honest, are about the only ones who's current work I'm still actively following), I have to admit that part of me almost wonders if video reviews dying out might actually be a blessing in the long run. You see, there's this marvelous tool that most of you seems to have forgotten about that allows you to publish reviews and provide all the wonderful benefits they contribute to the arts without any of the assorted headaches that video (or even audio) reviewing carries with it...it's called the written word.



I hate to be the one to say it, but video reviewing has contributed a certain level of laziness to the process of writing reviews. One of the prerequisites for being a good reviewer used to be vivid description, because for most of history you couldn't just play a clip of whatever it was you were discussing...you had to convey the feeling of what it was like with your WORDS. I actually had a twitter acquaintance (whom I shall not name here) who was crowing on twitter about how he thought reviewing anything without playing an actual clip of the subject was 'no longer possible'. One, I refuse to accept that dumbing-down of the process that is my vocation; two, they still review books and theater that way, because they aren't conveniently suited to the internet-video treatment, and they seem to do just fine. I hate to sound like a grumpy old man, but the video review trend is not entirely unrelated to the movement of increasing shallowness and lack of attention span in our culture that allowed the unapologetic trashiness everyone rails against in modern media to come to popularity in the first place.



Also, the blurring of the line between MST3K/Rifftrax style comedic commentary on bad media and actual serious criticism, which can almost entirely be blamed on video reviews, has done severe harm to both genres (as very few people are actually capable of doing both well, and most video reviewers these days don't even seem to understand the difference between them). I blame Doug Walker for this: as much as I enjoyed his early work (roughly 2008-2011), I really wish he had chosen a stage handle that didn't have the word 'critic' in it. It ultimately confused thousands of people about the actual meaning of that word and the fact that Walker is emphatically not one, a group that unfortunately came to include Walker himself in later years.



So ultimately, while I feel terribly sorry for the few video reviewers I can still say I admire, and while I may be guilty of revisiting a fair number of the older video reviews from the genre's heyday for entertainment on a more frequent basis that I'd like to admit, there really is a part of me that thinks the destruction of the video review, while certainly painful in the moment, might actually be the best thing for the future of the internet and the profession of artistic criticism in the long run. Maybe that makes me seem heartless, because video reviewing now constitutes many people's livelihoods. But to be perfectly honest, if you're really any good at reviewing, you could probably make the leap to written reviews once that becomes a more profitable platform. And if you truly AREN'T competent enough to keep a reader's attention without putting pictures of the thing you're reviewing on a screen, you probably shouldn't be i the reviewing business in the first place. And while this may make me something of a bad person, there are several no-talent, arrogant video reviewers I know that I'd LOVE to see taken down a peg by being forced to realize they're not good enough to succeed on their words alone.



So, this has been me rambling about my thoughts on the current copyright situation. Don't take me too seriously here...I get that the video reviewers are the ones in the right here, and it would always be nice to see right prevail. But often it doesn't, and sometimes the fact that it doesn't turns out to be exactly what the situation really needed...I could quote a thousand examples of far more serious injustices from history that turned out to have long-term benefits, though just for the record if you challenge me to provide some I'm not going to do it on twitter, because I know from experience that accurate discussion of historical factors does't go over well there. Granted, this little piece of philosophizing might not go over especially well itself, but I care about criticism as a profession enough that I think I'm going to take the risk. If any of my Twitter companions have any thoughts on my long-winded ramblings (assuming they actually read this far), I hope they will tell me what they think, even if what they think is that I'm a pompous ass or something to that effect.

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