Is anybody aware of this new fad of sending video emails? Among all the fads I’ve encountered recently, this one is the most obnoxious.
In case you aren’t yet aware of it, here is what it’s like. Say, a colleague wants to inform you about a meeting. So instead of sending an email saying, “The meeting will take place in room 11 at 11:11 on 11/11,” s/he sends an email saying, “Please follow the link to this video to find out when and where the meeting takes place.”
So you have to leave your email client, go to YouTube, sit through the commercial and the video, and then write down the information by hand because copy-pasting into Google Calendar” is not possible, then go back to the email client – only to find a new link to a new video correcting a mistake in the first video.
Do you know how many emails I get each day? I worked 12 hours straight yesterday and 13 hours the day before. And I’m not complaining, I like work, work makes me happy. But I detest it when people cannibalize my time with these faddy inventions that don’t contribute anything to my life.
Clarissa's Blog 
I like to think of a myself as a basically decent, non-violent kind of person, but getting email links to youtube videos as a method of “information” could change that in a hurry…..
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You know? And then one more video to correct the first video? The meeting itself might end up being shorter than the process of getting informed about the meeting.
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I rarely watch videos. This is really obnoxious. I think I would just reply to such an email saying that I do not watch videos and ask for text instead. So far, it has not happened to me.
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Off topic and unrelated to anything in this post, but ResearchGate just informed me that someone from Ukraine viewed my profile and downloaded some of my publications. I wonder if I can get ResearchGate to tell me if they were separatists or not?
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The separtists aren’t Ukrainians (and I doubt if the invading Russians or hired muscle Chechens) have much in the way of academic interests…
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It seems like Putin has taken away the Chechens and just brought in the regular Russian army. The reason for this is that apparently the Chechens insisted that for religious reasons they had to bury their dead and it was a whole production to remove their bodies from the war zone back to Russia. Now, Russian soldiers can all just be dumped in unmarked graves and their families can easily be persuaded to lie and say they are still alive.
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Not all of us have the cash flow and/or kredit to butt heads with our choice of Big Phone or Big Cable. My window on the online world is a pre-paid $ell phone, so I’m on a restricted bandwidth diet. For me, a memo in the form of a video would be not only a waste of time, but an imposed hardship.
Bandwidth-wise, a picture is worth (and by “is worth” I mean costs) a lot more than a thousand words, and of course at 30 frames per second, a 34 second video is worth a thousand pictures…
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Exactly. Our students all suffer when they are required to engage in needless use of faddy technology. That’s why I never insist that homework and lab should be printed out. This is real hardship for many people.
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I have not seen this, but would not like it!
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“No, I didn’t get your E-mail, but perhaps that’s because you didn’t send it as plain text without links in it — my E-mail client SPAM filters anything with video links in it, for instance, such as YouTube …”
Then adhere to a policy of not showing up to meetings “announced” with pretentious online videos — this “fad” will end rather quickly as a result, and the offending people will rather quickly be put in their proper place.
I also don’t bother with pretentious puffery “podcasts” that are high-bandwidth videos full of badly composed speech — I’ll quite happily skip a bunch of “uuuh” and “aaah” sounds from someone who can’t get to the point.
Most of these people who are just now “discovering” quick video recording technology do not understand that many people would happily do without hearing their voices or seeing their persons, and that it is inevitable that they will need to learn the hard way …
Remember vanity Web pages? This too shall pass. 🙂
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I also feel quite a bit of resentment against people who have so much time that they can waste it on these things.
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“So you have to leave your email client, go to YouTube, sit through the commercial and the video…”
Wait… commercials? Your colleagues are monetizing the videos that tell you the time and location of meetings you need to attend? Are they desperate for cash or something?
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Now that I’ve thought about it some more, I’m wondering if all of these videos are from the same channel and if that channel is owned by the university. They might be trying to bring in extra revenue by making the faculty watch monetized Youtube videos.
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“I worked 12 hours straight yesterday and 13 hours the day before. And I’m not complaining, I like work, work makes me happy.”
Russian proverb:
“работа не волк, в лес не убежит.” (Work is not like a wolf, it won’t run away from you into the forest).
Yes. I understand your point. It’s a bit like students writing papers with emoticons instead of expressing emotions.
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Yes, there are many Russian proverbs that are anti-work. Explains a lot, doesn’t it?
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Our kids’ school has started doing a variation of this–not video, but audio. We get an email saying to click on the link and hear the message, which we have also received in the form of a robocall at every single one of our varied phone numbers. It’s really, really annoying.
It also disturbs me to think that the superintendent of our school district isn’t literate enough to just write a damn email.
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