World Chess match stumbles on…(Part II)
Carlsen 2-Karjakin 2
(Part II)
Monkey’s, cameras and the resulting on-line chaos
If a visitor to a zoo accidently dropped his video camera into the monkey’s cage then the chances are that the monkey would pick up the camera and start randomly press buttons and what not, before he would get bored and eventually drop the camera to the ground.
Assuming that the ‘record’ button had been pressed, then the camera would continue to record until either the battery was dead or the camera had been recovered by the owner. If then the contents of said camera were immediately uploaded to YouTube, apart from the initial amusement, the whole thing would quickly be realized to be ridiculous. Without a story line, plot or even the slightest editing, there would not be a shred of value to the video, except by accident ofcourse.
As obvious as this is to any discerning person, it is precisely this monkey business that has overtaken the online coverage of the World Chess Championship match between Magnus Carlsen and Sergey Karjakin. Hours and hours and hours of un-edited streaming by exhausted commentators merely repeating themselves, over and over again. On Monday this indignity went on for 6 hours straight. Yesterday 7 hours. Is this the best that we can do?
Ofcourse, I want to make it clear that there are also some excellent YouTube videos out there that carefully analyze each game played so far. Grandmaster Danny King, just to mention one, has done an excellent job so far. But these videos are edited carefully, and appear only AFTER the game has been played. And the fact that these edited videos get thousands of hits speaks volumes of the quality and craftmanship involved in producing them.
Why then are the AGON organizers–as well as some of the more popular sites in the chess world–effectively producing hours and hours of clearly declining quality content and deliberately dumping everything on the internet? The answer is simple: BECAUSE IT IS EASY to do with today’s technology. Even a monkey can do it…
