So as someone who vastly prefers taking in information as text than as audio or video I\u2019d been a little dismayed with the way the internet\u2019s energies turned lately, I never \u201cgot into\u201d 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\u2019s been \u201cwatching\u201d the Surviving R. Kelly documentary as, I suppose, Black Twitter livetweets their reactions on the #SurvivingRKelly hashtag
I appreciated it better than last decade\u2019s form of TV \u201crecaps\u201d, 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 or a labeled reaction, like \u201chis brother tho: [reaction gif]\u201d. It feels somehow less intermediated video-as-text, like I\u2019m 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\u2019s 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\u2019s a similar class distinction in the energy in the pews in black and Pentecostal churches, or sporting events)
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