It's easy to stay glued to war videos from the Ukraine, these days. For me, many of them are found on the Telegram platform. Sometimes BitChute.
What has amazed me is how little information and understanding are actually conveyed in a video, at least when it is unprofessional or made under duress. I wonder: which side (Russian or Ukrainian) am I even looking at? What is the message or point that is being made by this video? So an unidentifiable jet plane just whizzed across the sky -- it barely shows on the screen. Can't they keep the camera from jerking around so much?
Sometimes a caption does more good than a jumble of dancing pixels. Would it be too utopian to dream of a caption without military acronyms?
Some of these videos lend themselves to radio more than television-style video. They are just talking heads in a studio -- there is nothing to look at, so why does it need to be a video? What a waste of bandwidth! For this type of video it would be an improvement to put a slideshow of still-photographs, legible maps, or charts on the screen, rather than a talking head.
We will probably see more and more of these interview type videos because they are the cheapest and easiest type to make.
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But over in the world of print, it is easy to become impatient with the sheer verbosity of professional writers. Let them rediscover what a simple declarative sentence looks like. Damn their parenthetical clauses and commas. Let them rediscover the Anglo-Saxon language and spurn excessive Latinizations. (what used to be called "ink-horn words.")
A trend has developed recently that is quite hopeful. The writer puts out the same content in audio/podcast form a few days after the written form. The narration is done by somebody with a good voice, rather than the author.
There is a way to combine these two approaches. Winston Churchill was a popular author at one time. I read one of his history books and was disappointed because it seemed like a mere 'cut and paste' job.
His magic sauce was not in the content or in original thinking but rather in a lazy typewriter! He walked around the room, talking out loud, and dictating to a secretary/stenographer. Therefore the reader encountered English that sounded more like spoken-English than turgid, distended book-English.
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