Podcasts, Video, and the Death of Text

Recently the Cocoa development bloggers have been abuzz with talk of ObjC, Ruby, Python and Cocoa. (I could worry about the fact Perl's not in that list, but I Sherm's done as good a job as he could given the relative lack of community support; I'm sure the underlying "object model" didn't help either).

It was only on reading this post on Theocacao, though, that I realised that (one of?) the starting points for this whole discussion was John Gruber on the Hivelogic podcast. Now, I'm not a big podcast listener. I can't code while listening to speech, so it's out when I'm in front of a computer at home and work, pretty much. There's Radio 4 for when I'm in the house away from the computer, and my commute's not really long enough for them either. Unless there's a transcript, in other words, all I know about podcasts is the shadow they leave in the textual web.

Similarly, I've not listened to the Backstage podcast on DRM and iPlayer, but there's a lot of follow-up material that I can read. Meanwhile, Monocle's web presence seems to spurn text in favour of video and audio, which means that I can't easily point out the part of the interview with the Lego CEO where he talks about Harry Potter being a less successful licence than Star Wars, nor can I rely on it as an archive (unlike, say, the Economist's site).

On Friday, Chris Heathcote was suggesting that our generation - the one that grew up with a textual internet (including the web) might be the odd ones out. If you're ten years older, your media landscape is dominated by (broadcast) radio and television. Ten years younger and podcasts, embedded Flash video and multimedia-heavy websites dominate. In the middle there's us stubborn holdouts. Some of us remember Usenet as a golden age, others the early years of blogs, but we're united by being primarily text-based, but things are changing.

I'd argue it's a great loss, but maybe that's just because the tools to annotate, mix, and link together audio and video aren't there. (Let's face it, weblog permanent links took a horribly long time to show up). On the other hand, it's possible I'm just being a grumpy old man.