Sorry for the late post-had this up earlier on the site under a different blogger name initially.
Anyway, I find a lot of new media, particularly internet-based content lacking in substance. It seems that a lot of times authors, directors, and artists get caught up in the tricks of photoshop and iMovie (or FinalCut if you're dedicated) or audio editing and overlook the step of actually imbuing their creations with an original, interesting idea. Nowhere is this more evident than on YouTube, an extremely popular repository for parody videos, "funny" home accident videos, along with other attempts at humor often cheapened by overuse of star wipes, glitter, and the addition of bad music to hype up the video. Anyone can take a music video or coverage of a campaign speech and do a "funny remix" on youtube, like the spate of digital video copycats that resulted from the SNL shorts "Dick in a Box" or "Lazy Sunday". When so many seem to be substituting computer effects and editing tricks for real humor, I often find the greatest laughs from a decidedly low tech option: Married to the Sea, otherwise known as the "champagne of comics".
This little gem of a webcomic has provided me with laughs on a regular basis since I came across it last year. Every strip is an absurd story told with random illustrations, including victorian scenes and 70's instruction manual scenarios, which the author warps to his own twisted ends through the addition of simple Times New Roman style captions. He does some photoshop manipulation of the images to fit them in frame, but there is no alteration whatsoever beyond simply arranging them to tell a story. It often looks like the author has just ripped his illustrations out of some old textbook or airline safety card, erased a portion of it with the end of a number 2 pencil, and finally run it through an old typewriter to add his ridiculous commentary.
The whole presentation reminds me a lot of the DIY charm of the Paper Tiger TV video we watched in Alternative Media. I'm not sure if this actually constitutes "Alternative" (I'm not sure what that actually means at the moment either-perhaps soon), but it is certainly a rougher, more old-school (hah) option for your daily humor fix. I think for that reason it escapes the glut of parody videos and flash animation that constitutes a large part of mainstream internet humor.
The link is:
www.marriedtothesea.com
~Ben D
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Granted, much of youTube, has little content of interest. That has been the complaint about public access television also. But that does not mean that the RESOURCE and INFRASTRUCTURE is a problem. It means that we need to develop models of ways in which these tools can be used. I post using youTube because the uploading is very quick, I can get the embedding code immediately and repost on blogs or other sites. There are people trying to develop a non-commercial, more virtuous form of youTube, but the problem is that the bandwidth and speed are still so much greater at that commercial site. DeeDee
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