Bring back the written word!

Last week the Cincinnati Enquirer published a rather odd slideshow about The Bunt that Reds Manager Extraordinaire called on Opening Day. He essentially pulled the bat out of the hands of both Brandon Phillips, the bunter, and Joey Votto, since having an open base was an invitation to walk him. But the point of this post is not to “second guess” Dusty, as the complaints about the complaints go. It was the way the information was presented, using a slideshow of photos that weren’t very relevant to the play, with captions that were just broken bits of what could have been a great article. (Unfortunately I can't find it again to link to it.)

I immediately pictures some editor in the Enquirer office who hasn’t quite gotten this whole internet thing but is aware enough to know photos attract pageviews. He’s staring at the original article – words on a screen – asking his staff how they could make the article (which he doesn’t understand because there are too many numbers) better. Some intern who has no hope in hell of ever getting a job at a newspaper screams “Photos!” The editor says “Great idea. Someone throw something together.”

Seriously, the slideshow was that dumb, no better word to describe it. Dumb, because it represents what the internet has become. Dumb. Everything is about images; no one reads anymore. It’s like one neverending children’s picture book. See Dick. See Jane. See Dick and Jane and all of society collapsing.

Whoever said a picture is worth a thousand words could not have envisioned the vapidness of the internet. An old photo of an aged, retired Earl Weaver sitting at a pre-game ceremony of some sort doesn’t tell a story at all, especially not one about how he hated the bunt. The only story this slideshow told was the one about the decline of newspapers and reading in general. This is the internet today, the tldr; age.

That brings me to instagram. Oh how I loathe instagram, loathe the terrible shots people share, loathe the fact that people think they are good shots in the first place. Instagram is a photographer’s nightmare, a wasteland of bad coloration, fuzzy focus, and a graininess that I guess is supposed to represent nostalgia, when we didn’t have this awesome, high-resolution technology to capture reality as it truly looks. Seriously folks, we live in an HD world. Why on earth would you willingly go back to the days of poor technology?

Ugh. So much complaining here at the church. But come on, people! Stop rejecting beautiful things! Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder; it’s in the brain. We seem to have a collective mental disease these days. We’ve discarded the sacred for the profane.

That dumb slideshow ruined a good article (and wasted one of my allotted 20 free ones.) But that’s all I have to say about that.