So as someone who vastly prefers taking in information as text than as audio or video I’d been a little dismayed with the way the internet’s energies turned lately, I never “got into” YouTube and honestly resent untranscribed podcasts

But I did these days have an interesting new experience where the internet made something timebound video into a readable form, and that’s been “watching” the Surviving R. Kelly documentary as, I suppose, Black Twitter livetweets their reactions on the #SurvivingRKelly hashtag

I appreciated it better than last decade’s form of TV “recaps”, either the first-wave amateurs or the later entry-level writers of the magazineblog era. Which, at some level had to be about the recapper’s voice, or focus at least

Whereas these individual tweets in chronological order, in different voice but kind of in conversation with each other, usually a quote – or a labeled reaction, like “his brother tho: [reaction gif]”. It feels somehow less intermediated video-as-text, like I’m getting the narrative and arc and pacing of the underlying material itself, but in a text-novel-form, hitting the high points without the connective tissue.

(Like how people say a book adapted to a movie they cut stuff but no even if there’s less dialogue and plot points can you imagine if they described every single thing in frame in every setting and every action the actors performed? It would be insane. Picture worth a thousand words, you know.)

Anyway one thing I remember from college in a few different classes, it used to be typical to talk to your friends, and talk back to the performance, at the theater, and how training the audience out of that became a real class distinction preserved in the way black audiences related to performances in movie theaters

(I suppose there’s a similar class distinction in the energy in the pews in black and Pentecostal churches, or sporting events)