Move over, text: Video is the new medium of our lives [MIT Tech Review]

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The other day I idly opened TikTok to find a video of a young woman refinishing an old hollow-bodied electric guitar.

It was a montage of close-up shots—looking over her shoulder as she sanded and scraped the wood, peeled away the frets, expertly patched the cracks with filler, and then spray-painted it a radiant purple. She compressed days of work into a tight 30-second clip. It was mesmerizing.

Of course, that wasn’t the only video I saw that day. In barely another five minutes of swiping around, I saw a historian discussing the songs Tolkien wrote in The Lord of the Rings; a sailor puzzling over a capsized boat he’d found deep at sea; a tearful mother talking about parenting a child with ADHD; a Latino man laconically describing a dustup with his racist neighbor; and a linguist discussing how Gen Z uses video-game metaphors in everyday life.

I could go on. I will! And so, probably, will you. This is what the internet looks like now. It used to be a preserve of text and photos—but increasingly, it is a forest of video.

This is one of the most profound technology shifts that will define our future: We are entering the age of the moving image.

For centuries, when everyday people had to communicate at a distance, they really had only two options. They could write something down; they could send a picture. The moving image was too expensive to shoot, edit, and disseminate. Only pros could wield it.

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.

“My students were like, ‘If there’s a video over seven seconds, we’re not watching it.’”
Brianna Wiens, Waterloo University

There’s also an increasingly sophisticated lexicon of visual styles. Today’s video creators riff on older film aesthetics to make their points. Brianna Wiens, an assistant professor of digital media and rhetoric at Waterloo University, says she admired how a neuroscientist used stop-motion video, a technique from the early days of film, to produce TikTok discussions of vaccines during the height of the covid-19 pandemic. Or consider the animated GIF, which channels the “zoetrope” of the 1800s, looping a short moment in time to examine over and over.

Indeed, as video becomes more woven into the vernacular of daily life, it’s both expanding and contracting in size. There are streams on Twitch where you can watch someone for hours—and viral videos where someone compresses an idea into mere seconds. Those latter ones have a particular rhetorical power because they’re so ingestible. “I was teaching a class called Digital Lives, and my students were like, If there’s a video over seven seconds, we’re not watching it,” Wiens says, laughing.

Are there dangers ahead as use of the moving image grows? Possibly. Maybe it will too powerfully reward people with the right visual and physical charisma. (Not necessarily a novel danger: Text and radio had their own versions.) More subtly, video is technologically still adolescent. It’s not yet easy to search, or to clip and paste and annotate and collate—to use video for quietly organizing our thoughts, the way we do with text. Until those tool sets emerge (and you can see that beginning), its power will be limited. Lastly, maybe the moving image will become so common and go-to that’ll kill off print culture.

Media scholars are not terribly stressed about this final danger. New forms of media rarely kill off older ones. Indeed, as the late priest and scholar Walter Ong pointed out, creating television and radio requires writing plenty of text—all those scripts. Today’s moving-media culture is possibly even more saturated with writing. Videos on Instagram and TikTok often include artfully arranged captions, “diegetic” text commenting on the action, or data visualizations. You read while you watch; write while you shoot.

“We’re getting into all kinds of interesting hybrids and relationships,” notes Lev Manovich, a professor at the City University of New York. The tool sets for sculpting and editing video will undoubtedly improve too, perhaps using AI to help auto-edit, redact, summarize. 

One firm, Reduct, already offers a clever trick: You alter a video by editing the transcript. Snip out a sentence, and it snips out the related visuals. Public defenders use it to parse and edit police videos. They’re often knee-deep in the stuff—the advent of body cameras worn by officers has produced an ocean of footage, as Reduct’s CEO, Robert Ochshorn, tells me. 

Meanwhile, generative AI will make it easier to create a film out of pure imagination. This means, of course, that we’ll see a new flood of visual misinformation. We’ll need to develop a sharper culture of finding the useful amid the garbage. It took print a couple of centuries to do that, as scholars of the book will tell you—centuries during which the printing press helped spark untold war and upheaval. We’ll be living through the same process with the moving image.

So strap yourselves in. Whatever else happens, it’ll be interesting. 

Clive Thompson is the author of Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World.