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Facebook Is Wrong, Text Is Deathless (kottke.org)

Posted by msmash on from the future-is-here dept.

Facebook is seeming shifting its attention to video -- first by allowing people and publishers alike to upload videos on the social network, and then by Facebook Live, with which people are able to broadcast themselves to their friends and followers. Recently, an executive with the company said that Facebook will be probably all video in five years. "The best way to tell stories in this world, where so much information is coming at us, actually is video," Nicola Mendelsohn, who heads up Facebook's operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa said. "It conveys so much more information in a much quicker period. So actually the trend helps us to digest much more information." Tim Carmody, a reporter whose work has appeared on Wired, and The Verge among others, makes a strong case for texts, and why it is always going to be here. He writes: Text is surprisingly resilient. It's cheap, it's flexible, it's discreet. Human brains process it absurdly well considering there's nothing really built-in for it. Plenty of people can deal with text better than they can spoken language, whether as a matter of preference or necessity. And it's endlessly computable -- you can search it, code it. You can use text to make it do other things. In short, all of the same technological advances that enable more and more video, audio, and immersive VR entertainment also enable more and more text. We will see more of all of them as the technological bottlenecks open up. And text itself will get weirder, its properties less distinct, as it reflects new assumptions and possibilities borrowed from other tech and media. It already has! Text can be real-time, text can be ephemeral -- text has taken on almost all of the attributes we always used to distinguish speech, but it's still remained text. It's still visual characters registered by the eye standing in for (and shaping its own) language.

13 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. I'll believe text is dead... by tekrat · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'll believe text is dead when facebook replaces their logo with a video. And not a video *of* text. In the meantime, there's lots of text on facebook, whether they like it or not.

    --
    If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
    1. Re:I'll believe text is dead... by tripleevenfall · · Score: 5, Insightful

      When I click on a link for a news story or some other item which seems interesting and it turns out to be a video, I click the back button instantly.

      Video is a stupid medium for this. It's a devolution. People started getting their news -for example- online, because you get what you want instantly, you don't have to sit through a long broadcast to find the items you're interested in.

      The point of digital media is supposed to be instant quick access. Not to mention how annoying video is and how it's rare that any video in your FB timeline is something you actually want to see.

    2. Re:I'll believe text is dead... by Grishnakh · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Don't tell Facebook this; I really want to see them push this all-video strategy, and ASAP too.

      Hopefully it'll finally get everyone to abandon that POS site, turning it into the next MySpace.

    3. Re:I'll believe text is dead... by pla · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This. I have zero interest in watching a five minute video just to get the same content I could read in thirty seconds.

      On top of that, usually when I want to check the news, I do so from work; kinda rude to my coworkers to have some random whiny news anchor blathering on in the background (when it even works, since they block most major video hosts to save bandwidth).

      And FWIW, this applies to a million other gratuitous uses of video as well, from tech tips to video game walkthroughs to DIY/HowTo guides. It has gotten so bad that I wish I could just have "-youtube" included by default in all my Google searches, since I need to add it half the time anyway.

    4. Re:I'll believe text is dead... by Maritz · · Score: 4, Insightful

      My first instinct is that someone as highly paid as her ought to have a functioning brain, and realise that video is never going to replace text or even come close.

      Take videocalling. Back in the 90s we thought that once we could video call, that's all we'd do. Not exactly true is it.

      --
      I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
    5. Re:I'll believe text is dead... by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This. I have zero interest in watching a five minute video just to get the same content I could read in thirty seconds.

      THIS.

      Perhaps the two most important features of text which aren't mentioned in TFS -- (1) we generally read faster than we speak, so we can usually gather information faster from text, and (2) text is much more skimmable.

      Trying to get information from a video often drives me nuts: you can try to fast-forward or skip ahead (then wait for it to buffer each time), only to find you went too far, or maybe the person doesn't talk about what you want in that segment or whatever. It's a pain in the neck. Video is good for what it is: showing visual stuff in time. If you need a tutorial on how to do some physical skill, then sure, make a video. If you want to explain an abstract concept, video just slows down things for your audience.

      I first realized the problem with video (and audio) with audio podcasts that have transcripts available online. I'd start listening to a podcast, and realize I didn't care so much about the delivery, but I wanted to know the gist of the topic... and if there's an online transcript, I can often skim an hour-long program in a few minutes and find the relevant bits to read in depth. MUCH more efficient. Sure, it's fun to listen to a podcast when I'm busy doing something else that's rather mindless, but if I actually want information efficiently, text is FAR superior as a delivery method.

      But beyond the efficiency, what concerns me more about this trend is the potential for manipulation that comes from video. I remember seeing a couple of studies years ago showing the difference between people who watched an opinion/news report on something vs. reading a short passage about it. When they were asked to express opinions, a number of disturbing trends came out. (For example, video viewers expressed a higher confidence in their understanding, even though it wasn't better than those who read text.) But most worryingly, the people who watched the video were less able to critically evaluate the information that was presented to them. That is, if they watched a news anchor present an opinion on a controversial issue, they were more likely to be persuaded by a weak argument from a video than they were from text.

      That last part doesn't surprise me at all -- after all, we love TV news "personalities," who dress up and look attractive as they tell us the news. Why wouldn't we trust what they say? And with video, it's harder to go back and review parts that maybe weren't quite thought-through. If you're reading an argument, you can stop and think over parts that don't make sense, perhaps even go back a few sentences and re-read. With a video, you're forced to listen at the pace of the speaker, and they obviously will alter their delivery in ways to emphasize their positive points while downplaying or muddling the negatives.

      So, a move toward video isn't just decreasing efficiency of content delivery -- it's potentially making the population stupider, more malleable, and less capable of critical thought. That's NOT a good trend overall.

    6. Re:I'll believe text is dead... by AlanBDee · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Ironically, we did not replace phone calls with video. Instead we replaced phone calls with text messages.

  2. Facebook by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The narcissist's toolbox

  3. No shit by redmid17 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Ms Mendelsohn,

    What you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

    It's quicker to consume text than video. Just an FYI

    Note: Unabashed repost from yesterday because that was the stupidest thing I'd heard all day and work had a Trump segment on in the background

  4. Motivation behind push for Video by sinij · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The real motivation behind Facebook's push toward video are ads. It is too easy to filter and ignore banner ads from text communication, it is much harder tasks to filter commercials from the video stream.

    So here you go, this isn't philosophical debate about the future of communications - it is classical foot-in-the-door technique in a move toward streaming video commercials to Facebook users.

  5. Wrong because lack of high-speed internet by RogueWarrior65 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's truly amazing to me what an ivory tower Silicon Valley has become. Seems like everybody there assumes that everyone has blazing fast internet that is SYMMETRICAL!!! Sorry, but lack of symmetry is one reason why using the cloud for everything fails. That and speeds that most people are willing to pay for pales in comparison to what Silicon Valley likely averages. Further, they assume that everyone has that kind of speed wherever they go which to them means from the hipster coffee bar, to their fancy-shmancy all-expense-paid offices, to their hipster clubs, to their trendy loft apartment. Newsflash, people, there is a big world out there and it doesn't have 4G access.

  6. In The Beginning Was The Command Line by swm · · Score: 4, Informative

    The word is the only system of encoding thoughts—the only medium—that refuses to dissolve in the devouring torrent of electronic media.
    —Neal Stephenson, In The Beginning Was The Command Line

  7. Text is DANGEROUS. by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    With video, you can tell immediately whether the speaker is attractive or not, and ignore the ones who aren't. If you're reading text instead of watching someone talking, you're in mortal danger of paying attention to someone who isn't attractive . The horror.