The smartphone, the internet, and social networks like TikTok have rapidly and utterly transformed this situation. It’s now common, when someone wants to hurl an idea into the world, not to pull out a keyboard and type but to turn on a camera and talk. For many young people, video might be the prime way to express ideas.
As media thinkers like Marshall McLuhan have intoned, a new medium changes us. It changes the way we learn, the way we think—and what we think about. When mass printing emerged, it helped create a culture of news, mass literacy, and bureaucracy, and—some argue—the very idea of scientific evidence. So how will mass video shift our culture?
For starters, I’d argue, it is helping us share knowledge that used to be damnably hard to capture in text. I’m a long-distance cyclist, for example, and if I need to fix my bike, I don’t bother reading a guide. I look for a video explainer. If you’re looking to express—or absorb—knowledge that’s visual, physical, or proprioceptive, the moving image nearly always wins. Athletes don’t read a textual description of what they did wrong in the last game; they watch the clips. Hence the wild popularity, on video platforms, of instructional video—makeup tutorials, cooking demonstrations. (Or even learn-to-code material: I learned Python by watching coders do it.)
Video also is no longer about mere broadcast, but about conversation—it’s a way to respond to others, notes Raven Maragh-Lloyd, the author of Black Networked Resistance and a professor of film and media studies at Washington University. “We’re seeing a rise of audience participation,” she notes, including people doing “duets” on TikTok or response videos on YouTube. Everyday creators see video platforms as ways to talk back to power.
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