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Me, My Time & You Tube

Once again the need to move things forward seems to be the very thing that is preventing me from doing just that. My current battle with Just3G seems never ending, and whilst I may have lost a significant amount of money, I can at least take some satisfaction in the fact that it would appear my efforts have stopped Just3G from catching anyone else out with their dubious terms & conditions. Now I’m looking for a new phone contract, and will be going with a reputable dealer in the hopes that this does not happen again.

So, other than the immense amount of hours I have spent on the Just3G case these past few months, I have been working part time to cover the bills so I can continue to spend the rest of my time working on my portfolio. It’s taking a long time, but hopefully the effort will pay off in the end, as having seen the standard of work at New Designers, I really need to make my folio something special.

My Time

Alongside my portfolio, I have been putting a lot of work into the Innovation-Station, notably going Pink for October. At the moment I have a good 9 or 10 drafts that I have written on various aspects of design, that I really want to get up in the next few weeks, along with a couple of pages for the resources section talking about modelling in Pro|Engineer and working with Stamp chips, which will hopefully come in useful to the guys from IPD. A couple of the drafts have been there for a fair while, and it has taken me ages to get round to finishing them, which is a source of constant annoyance. Not just with regards to those particular drafts, but to the fact that everything seems to take forever to get done at the moment.

As I have learnt, one of the downsides of Product Design is that most employers expect you to be able to do the work of a Graphic Designer, an Engineer, a Media Designer, a Materials technician a Model maker and have an excellent knowledge of all their respective tools. In effect employers seem to be looking for Product Designers who can do the work of 2 or 3 specialists. Now, don’t get me wrong, the freedom afforded by the Product Designer’s “Jack of all trades” skill set is the very thing that attracted me to this subject and career in the first place, but constantly keeping my technical skills up to date is a very time consuming activity. Whilst this discussion is a different topic all together, it kind of leads into what I originally wanted to write about.

You Tube

The chances are you have been on YouTube, if only once, and if you hadn’t heard about it before you will surely know of it after it was bought out for $1.65 bn by Google. Now I don’t really go on YouTube very often, but when I do, I am invariably sickened by what I see, or more accurately, read.

Earlier I watched a cool video of four Sony Qrio robots dancing, and scrolled down the page, not to only to find comments about how great the engineering was, but comments ranging from “how Japan is better than engineering than the USA” to slightly more offensive comments stating “America could wipe Japan off the map” and “the Japanese are backwards”.

The ‘chat’ in that instance was actually pretty tame compared to one thread I read after watching a video about the new Eurofighter Typhoon - Britain’s new Tornado replacement. The abuse being banded about was extreme to say the least, with one guy from the states taking great amusement in recalling the events when ‘a third world country’ (Argentina) sunk a load of British ships (one ship, HMS Sheffield), because the British Pilots protecting the fleet were ‘A bunch of hooligans and chavs’. This, all spanning from some comment stating that the American F22 fighter was better than the European Eurofighter. Come on guys, get a life!

The Cost of Free

Like many I believe in an internet where freedom of speech reigns. However as history proves, give people freedom and it brings out the not only the very best, but the absolute worst in humanity. Like many others I usually try to spend my free time constructively, working on my website, developing my design skills, reading all my feeds. I don’t contribute to the web or blog communities as often as I would like, however I only contribute when I feel I have something valid and useful to say.

Some people though, seem to be able to find the time to spend hours commenting on sites like You Tube, choosing to spend their time abusing others for no good reason. What does anyone get from such mindless acts?  To prove my point, I am going to look at the comments on the first video I click on inside YouTube’s homepage. And the winner is...

Go f*ck yourself bloody whorebag! Your videos are just crap.

And that is in response to a video of a teenage girl talking about her life. Granted, it may not be the most interesting of videos to most people, me included, but I don’t think the girl in question is a ‘whorebag’. This leads me to the part that is most amusing about this situation: People watch videos which they surely will be of limited value or interest, yet watch them anyway. This I presume is just to allow them the privilege of spouting off some of their own expletive coated wisdom to the creator just to make themselves feel good.

It saddens me greatly, when I see this kind of behaviour on the internet, and it is not just on You Tube, it’s all over. Saying that, I am still trying to put my finger on what exactly makes YouTube such a magnet for these morons. Go to Flickr, and you will see nothing but genuine praise and friendly conversation in the comment lists. Go to YouTube, and you see the very worst in people. The question is, what is it that prompts people to behave like this on YouTube, and is there anything we can do to prevent it? Unfortunately this is a question I have no answer for, but just maybe, you do.