Friday, October 08, 2004

Video Punks

After Mike's brilliant find yesterday, I offer you this campaign contribution. Not because I think it is good -- in fact I think this one is counterproductive crap -- but because it is complete punk ethos in  the video era: no rules, no barriers, but everyone gets to play and create, skilled or not.

Of course, it is not like punk music ever started flowing forth from a bunch of 40-something neighbours in Minnesota, but somehow punk guerilla video seems to be doing it.

This exact phenomenon, incidentally, is what we were being told we had to make happen about 20 years ago by the likes of Laurel and Tognazzini in their UI books. Good stuff will happen when we take all these computer-based tools for video and music and writing and creation out of just the hands of technologists, and make them easy enough to be put in the hands of everyone else. This is why we have to study and make good user interfaces, no matter how much we feel we are 'dumbing down' these incredily powerful tools for computer neophytes who 'don't deserve it if they are not gonna put in the time to learn all this stuff right' -- a sentiment one can see expressed by technologists on Slashdot a lot when it comes to the user experience. Because by doing empowering everyone, we technologists give not just ourselves power to create on par with the big boys, but everyone else too, and the more gets created, the bigger the chance something really good will come forth.

And also massive, massive amounts of crap of how people had milk this morning on their cornflakes and their cat was so cute. But crap the creators at least get to like. And while they are sitting behind their Macs editing video, at least they are off the streets.