Between the creepy name and the glowing spermatozoa in the logo, readers can be forgiven for looking at the graphic on the right and assuming that washingtonpost.com is dabbling in creating Frankensteinian abominations/superbeings. Perhaps an alien/Katharine Graham hybrid that can squeeze secrets out of administration sources with its deadly tentacles? There’s room for all sorts of mischief in that Arlington skyscraper.
Sadly, that’s not the case. The project, entitled “onBeing“, is actually a new series of video essays that the Post will be adding to every Wednesday. Here’s how they describe it:
onBeing is a project based on the simple notion that we should get to know one another a little better. What you’ll find here is a series of videos that takes you into the musings, passions, histories and quirks of all sorts of people. The essence of who they are, who we are.
Hmm. It sounds slightly questionable, particularly given the past year’s cuts to the Post’s news-gathering staff. But we do genuinely enjoy the Style section’s Life Is Short feature, and this sounds like it’s cut from the same cloth. Maybe it won’t be so bad.
The site itself is an extremely slick Flash video player — it’s worth clicking through just to check out the interface. And the clips are all nicely shot in a style cribbed from Errol Morris (you might recognize it from those “Switch” commercials that Apple ran in the 90s). But the actual content is less than compelling.
Right now there are four videos on the site:
- A Georgetown nun talking about how she always sort of wanted to be a nun
- An affable cheesemaker discussing cheesemaking (“at high altitudes you need less rennet”)
- A kid edited together into an incoherent ramble about a number of things that sort of sound profound, if you’re easily fooled
- A genuinely interesting clip of a gay Mormon man speaking about how and why he continues to practice a faith that doesn’t want him
As you can probably tell, we were somewhat underwhelmed. Others might find different clips more or less appealing than we did, but we have a hard time imagining that anyone would be blown away by any of them. And we wonder if there’s much chance of that changing.
That’s because at its root, onBeing seems to be nothing more than a collection of personal essays with nearly-nonexistent constraints. That can be a fine thing — the same categorization can frequently be applied to This American Life, and that show is one of our favorite things in the world. But with an unclear focus, the only way for onBeing to promise viewers that they’ll be consistently entertained is to offer curatorial brilliance. Failure to do so results in a hit-or-miss mess that’s hardly worth keeping up with — e.g. NPR’s wildly inconsistent This I Believe series, CDs of which WAMU has been desperately hawking during this week’s membership drive.
It’s possible that onBeing will be shaped into a truly compelling collection of personal ruminations, but it’s got a ways to go before it gets there. It really is an awesome interface, though.
