The idiots are filming themselves! Come see the idiots!

The world is going to hell.

Virginia Heff, in her NY Times blog Screens, profiles LonelyGirl15, a homeschooled teen who passes all the time she's stuck in her bedroom because of domineering parents, making short autobiographical/philosophical video posts (called vlogs, I guess) for the world to see. She just sparked controversy over a tiff between her and her producer/boyfriend danielbeast. Her parents won't let her go hiking. No, wait, her parents do let her go hiking. And so on.

I still remember when blogs were all the controversy: "What, now semiliterate idiots can vomit their meaningless opinions all over the Web?" "What, the vacuum of cyberspace is now filled with musings about how annoying it is when someone eats all the chocolate out of the Neopolitan ice cream?" Meaningless tripe, all of it. I should know. Just look at this page, for god's sake.

Well, I guess the joke's on me--now we don't even need to be sub-sub literate. We can post videos instead.

I'm not particularly talking about Heff's primary subject. Lonelygirl knows enough about lighting and editing to avoid visual incoherence, and although there's only so much depth you can squeeze out of a lazy eye, it does function as a metaphor quite nicely.

But then I made the mistake of looking at some of the responses she got, ranging from the rambling to the snooty to the downright nasty. Look out, web talent scouts. Got your hands full here. Yowza.

Web videos sound great until you start wading through them. It's enough to make me long for the days of scrolls and quill pens. If all this is the stuff replacing books and films that require a few neurons firing, I don't want to be around when they put together 3-D filming techniques. Watching some frat bozo drink beer through a watering can from all possible angles of his living room would just be too depressing.

And the comments. Need I get into the comments? They outweigh the posts by pages, and the videos by hours. And who cares anyway?

For example, Rupert Brooke was born on this day, in 1887. If his "The Solider" had had a comment function when first published? "Hey, uh, Rupe, if that's your real name, I just want to say, like, your poem sucks? Um, I liked the extended metaphor of the soil as homeland and everything, but like, you could have said something about American involvement. We totally saved your asses. Wilson for Winners in '16!"

In my own effort to contribute to the Web's detritus, let me pose what the volume of empty-headedness of 75% of youtube's content says about the direction of our media culture? That it's easier and easier to find your own voice because of the ease of access to all these nifty tools? Or that it's going to be harder for anyone to be heard fighting against the cacophony of crap cluttering up the bandwidth anymore?

The world is, like, so going to hell.

Well, maybe I'll be proven wrong. I doubt it--I rarely am. But maybe video publishing will unearth a new generation of thought-provoking, challenging media for the world to consume. Of course it will, because I am so getting a vid camera! With an appropriately shaded nook in my classroom and enough interesting lesson plans, I could...get myself fired.

Just realized, folks--before I noticed, I'd spent forty minutes looking at a bunch of posts about a teen girl on camera. All because of a NY Times article. Which won't do me any good. Thanks to our beloved president and the Patriot Act, right now my ISP is on record at having drooled over adolescent video blogs. Send me cigarettes when they send me to the Pen.