The skeptics thought it wouldn’t work – that people didn’t want to watch what were essentially “talking heads” on TV. They were wrong – the series proved immensely popular because it mede the life of the mind accessible to the ordinary man on the street. If you keep underestimating the intelligence of your viewers, they’ll dumb down eventually.

You don’t want to watch a programme, let alone a full-length film or lengthy documentary, or even a half-hour news broadcast, on a computer screen.

I don’t? I must have been dreaming when I watched those hours of programing on my computer screen.

I think Sullivan is correct to a degree. YouTube’s primary market is the quick hit–short videos you can forward to friends. Yet I’ve also watched hours and hours of Google Videos of lectures by interesting speakers–lectures without fancy production values, just good speakers and good content.

Just because commercial television and YouTube specialize in sound bytes doesn’t mean that thoughtful discussions can’t be had in video form on the internet. It’s happening already, even if Andrew Sullivan isn’t watching. Perhaps he should watch some of the free TED videos to start…

On one hand the art of oral communcation in speeches and presentations may be enhanced by the youtube/podcast approach. The rhetoric department at Cal required that we study oral presentation and argument as a core course. So Pericles’s funeral oration or the Gettysburg Address gave one a sense of how to use language to capture the audience and make sure that one’s tone hit the mark.

That may work for podcats but new areas of study may be required for youtube as it does not seem amenable to the speech format. In fact I can recall looking away from a lecture that was visually boring but loving listening to it.

Last, although I like podcasts, reading still seems so much faster as far as obtaining and absorbing the information. Do you find that podcasts are working for you because you are doing something else at the same time or is there some other reason (maybe improved speech skills) in play?