Uh. I spent about 15 seconds clicking buttons, and out came a completely convincing 5 minute long documentary on the subject matter I selected. I always figured this type of thing would eventually be possible, but seeing it happen is ... kinda surreal. And disconcerting.
Not shown are the: - talent coordinators setting up the interviews - film crew shooting the interviews - journalists shooting the footage Really, the program is a "roll your own iMovie" whereby it does the mechanical stuff of transitions and edits. I'm a big fan of the presentation - I think this is a great way to get people involved in the subject they wish to learn about - but it's not going to replace newsgathering. Rather, it will give audiences a greater investment in the material they want to learn about, for better or worse.
Right. Absolutely. But what this does is completely blur the lines between legitimate news gathering, and high-school student collage. Joe Viewer doesn't know that it was cobbled together by a 14-year old with unidentified motivations and intentions. As the dataset gets more populated with more content snippets, I can see it encouraging easy (wrong) arguments - eugenics, intelligent design, etc. Hard stuff is hard for a reason. It may be counterintuitive, or require more than a rudimentary understanding of weather patterns, or logarithmic scales, or p-values. This tool - like Twitter - can only lower the level of conversation to the least common denominator because the source material is easy snippets, not deep think-pieces that delve into the interesting bits of complex topics. That's my "disconcerting" thought.
