Medium seems to fit my “high type words out, low effort…” or rather “terrified of not meeting my expectations on editing a video essay” style well. Plus, it can bolster my writing portfolio.
Nothing encapsulates the millennial vs. zoomer tension like YouTube user Sound Effect Central’s video Fax machine sound effect. It was posted Jan 20, 2019, and has a middling 150,743 views. It is not a Fax Machine sound effect, it is a Dial Up sound effect, labeled as “Fax machine sound effect”. You could argue that Fax Machines still use a Dial Up modem, but as someone who has used a Fax Machine, and used to have Dial Up internet, no, this is not the sound of a “Fax Machine”.
And what is incredibly concerning is the amount of comments that seem to remain is blissful ignorance of this objective fact, preferring to just regurgitate the style of comment section memes that are sort of tepid, harmless, relatable way. And now there are multiple things that bother me. Of course they don’t know what a fax machine sounds like. But if they don’t know what a fax machine sounds like, why are they even here? Why are they commenting on this? I thought “surely, the top comment is going to be about how this is a Dial Up sound”, and when it wasn’t, and it wasn’t the second-to-top comment, and then the third-to-top comment kind of got around to asking that question in the dumbest way possible, and then someone said “faxs were basically the first emails”, I was a little broken.
If those faxs were the first emails, they wouldn’t be using a Dial Up modem. If they were using Dial Up, those fax machines would have been pre-dated by ARPANET. But how do you communicate this to a YouTube comments section? Why do you waste your time communicating this to a YouTube comments section?
