For God’s Sake, Get To The Point!

I remember noticing the issue first with Rush Limbaugh. I read the transcripts of his radio shows and the first thing I noticed was the endless, endless waffle. It was like Seinfeld, “the show about nothing”, with something thrown in after needing twenty minutes to get to the darn point.

Like many others, I have a fairly busy life. Not being retired, I – and many others with me – do not have one hour to devote to one simple issue. If the issue were very complex (say: Predestination) I would understand it if a video were long, but packed with content. But if the issue if a simple one (e.g. is this right, should Caius do that, was Sempronius wrong) then I’d say that less is most certainly more.

It often happens to me that I want to watch a video about a simple issue (e.g. a letter written to Francis) and, upon seeing that the video goes on literally forever (e.g. 59 minutes) I give up before starting.

Why are videos so long? The tendency to waffle a bit is natural, but again he who makes a video should know it, prepare a sort of bullet points list, and go on in proper order through them.

Perhaps it is because of the ads? Maybe so. But even in that case, wouldn’t it be better, for Mr Professional Videomaker, to produce more videos of ten or eleven minutes, but packed with content and which more people actually watch, then inflicting 59 minutes of waffle, alone or with Mr Waffling Guest, when most certainly ten would have sufficed to make the damn point?

I suspect in one hour I could read one and a half, perhaps two of those pre-V II encyclical letters actually full of content, and this would nourish me more than 20 hours of video waffling about one event happened yesterday.

You might say that I can simply not watch, and that’s that. Very true, and I actually don’t. But it seems to me that this is becoming endemic. It seems to me that it’s getting far too fashionable, and I am missing stuff which, if reasonably presented, would actually have been interesting.

I wish people would keep it short. I wrote this in a matter of minutes, and you will read it far faster than I wrote it. It makes the point in a, or so I think, fairly exhaustive way.

Or perhaps those interested in Catholic things are all retired people with a lot of time in their hands, and I am the exception.