It seems that the current craze in the blogsphere is to do podcasts and multimedia videos (posted on YouTube). Just about everyone’s doing it, so why isn’t SI?
Well, first of all, as my regular readers know, I’m not a lemming. I didn’t follow the spacers when they went la-la over MySpace. I didn’t follow the facers when they want stupid over Facebook. And I didn’t follow the twits when they went tweeters over Twitter. I’m not a mindless pitch-fork wielding zombie farmer who simply follows the loudest guy with the biggest burning stick. I’m capable of free thought and free expression and willing to make up my own damn mind.
But the real reason SI is multi-media free is this: I like being literate, and I assume that because you keep coming back, you do too. It’s bad enough that Twitter will make a twit out of you, demonstrated by the fact that it’s causing 30% of students to fail English competency, but if we move entirely to multimedia, it won’t be long before the majority of the population is unable to read at a high school level and becomes functionally illiterate. And that’s a fate I don’t want to share in. So I’ll stick to the written word. We’ll all be smarter for it.