I’ve just finished up a uni subject so I have a little more time to devote to the backlog of other projects that have been too quiet.
One of my uni friends referred me to the already gangbusters This is America music video. There are a bunch of reasons you wouldn’t want a child or teenager to watch this one, but with that caveat, it makes a number of points in a profound way that makes the most of the medium.
Having watched the video, I immediately wanted to read everything I could about it, to try and understand the underlying messages and references. And I wanted to share it with Kel. Somehow I managed to share it without explaining that it was a music video, and so she was trying to process it as a movie trailer, which made the visuals even harder to follow.
While at the time I was reading articles to try and understand things, increasingly the way to explain something is to turn to a video explanation instead.
One article I saw this evening was from (American Christian periodical) Relevant Magazine – Why Childish Gambino’s ‘This Is America’ Is a Prophetic Message We Can’t Ignore, but I was pulled out of that article (spending time explaining why saying something is prophetic doesn’t mean you agree with it) because of something I’ve never seen before in a Christian publication.
I understand that times are tough for publishing houses, but if you’re going to make a pull-quote that’s a Bible verse, or a series of them, do you really want to embed ads in there? Here’s a screen grab (I first saw it on mobile, but it’s on the desktop layout as well… it looks like it’s only for particularly long quotes.
So that’s me going from a conversation with my uni friends to a music video to a commentary about the music video to a Bible verse to a display ad. Quite a journey, but not such a long way to go in our hyperlinked life!
The great strength of the internet is the ability to link from one idea to another, and to treat all types of content as equal, but do we still have the capacity to recognise where that is becoming a problem?