I don鈥檛 take the bait anymore. When someone sends me a link to a video that promises to be 鈥渢he funniest thing you鈥檒l ever see!鈥� or the cutest, or the strangest, most profound or amazing, or whatever superlative is applied to it, I don鈥檛 watch it.
Too often, these videos 鈥� which always come with the assurance that they鈥檝e gone viral and have been gawked at by 50 gazillion people 鈥� are not funny, cute or anything else. They certainly aren鈥檛 profound or amazing. They鈥檙e just tripe.
But I did watch the nine-second video about Jared Frank, the Regina man who got kicked in the head by a train conductor as he was standing close to the tracks on Peru鈥檚 Machu Picchu.
I don鈥檛 know why I wanted to watch it. Maybe because 22 million people have already watched it and I thought 22 million people couldn鈥檛 be wrong.
Once upon a time, people wanted to gaze upon the beauties of the Sistine Chapel. Now, they want to watch a selfie of a guy getting kicked by a conductor as a train whizzes by. The video is so short and the action so fleeting that, if Frank himself weren鈥檛 there interpreting 鈥� 鈥淲ow, that guy kicked me in the head!鈥� is the video鈥檚 sole line of dialogue 鈥� it would be hard to figure out what was going on.
Obviously, the conductor kicked him to get him out of the way because he was afraid Frank would get hit by the train. One online poster said there was a bar sticking out of the side of the train that would have decapitated Frank had the conductor not booted him to greater safety.
So the reason for the kick might not be much of a mystery, but the aftermath of the video going viral, to use the annoying vernacular, is that unnamed companies clamoured for Frank to sign licensing agreements with them. He has now signed such an agreement, and it means he鈥檒l make some money whenever a TV broadcaster airs his video, and when YouTube pays him for views. The biggest mystery is not why the conductor kicked him. The biggest mystery is why is this worth any money to anyone?
You watch this thing and then you rue the nine seconds of your life spent watching it that you鈥檒l never get back again.
But this will only get better, or worse, depending on your perspective about videos gone viral. In their recent book, The New Digital Age, Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, and Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas, describe the future life of such videos, and it鈥檚 nightmarish.
Schmidt and Cohen write: 鈥溾�� you will be able to integrate any photos, videos and geographic settings that you choose to save into a single holographic device that you will place on the floor of your living room, instantaneously transforming the space into a memory room.鈥�
That means you鈥檒l be able to watch Jared Frank getting kicked in the head over and over on your living room walls, floor and ceiling. You鈥檒l even get to share his pain with your very own virtual migraine, while he continues to collect royalties 鈥� something which the tall foreheads at Google haven鈥檛 yet figured out how to get your holographic device to share with you.
Or you can watch the holographic version of that video of a dog barking what sounds like 鈥渘o鈥� when its owner tries to get it into its crate, or the one of the cat sticking its paw through the mail slot and batting away the letters the mail carrier is trying to deliver.
鈥淚f you鈥檙e feeling bored and want to take an hour-long holiday, why not turn on your holograph box and visit Carnival in Rio?鈥� Schmidt and Cohen ask. 鈥淭hrough virtual-reality interfaces and holographic-projection capabilities, you鈥檒l be able to 鈥榡oin鈥� these activities as they happen and experience them as if you were truly there.鈥�
What about people experiencing their own lives as if they were really there? I鈥檇 rather do that than waste my time watching a clip of some guy whose existence I never knew of moments earlier, getting kicked in the head in Peru.
