A number of people have urged me to express myself through video; instead of writing these essays, they suggest, I might reach more people through videos.
The reasoning here is that modern audiences are more receptive to video than to text. To put it starkly, they don’t like to read; video is their primary medium of knowledge consumption. If I want to reach them, the argument goes, I should use the medium that they’re most comfortable with. Some people have even gone so far as to warn that I won’t reach as many people through text as I will through video; I risk consigning my work to the dustbin of history by relying on the written word.
Two factors dominate my thinking, and neither of these factors seems to have been considered by those who urge me to produce more video.
Going with the grain
The first factor is a fundamental rule for any medium: in using a medium, the communicator must go with the grain of the medium, placing greatest effort into the strengths of the medium.
Text has three important strengths. First, it permits the most detailed and precise expression of ideas. I double-dog dare you to come up with any way other than text to communicate the notion expressed in three words: “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny."
Second, the reader can re-read difficult material. This is most useful at the level of sentences; if a sentence doesn’t immediately make sense to me, I can quickly re-read it. Even better, text allows the reader to carry out a kind of intellectual accounting process by comparing statements in one section of text with statements elsewhere. Aristotle was the first to realize that text is accountable where speech isn’t. A clever speaker can twist words to lead the audience by the nose through a long and convoluted argument that can end up with whatever conclusion the speaker desires. Socrates was a master of this process; some of his dialogues don’t stand up to careful reading—but you can’t figure this out unless you read the text carefully. If you were listening to him speaking, you’d never notice the inconsistencies.
Third, text communicates its content faster than any other medium. Most material in audio and video bores me; people just can’t talk fast enough. I find myself urging the speaker to hurry up and get to the point. Perhaps this factor doesn’t apply to most people; perhaps I’m an exceptionally fast reader and most people can digest content in video and audio just as quickly as with text. My defense here is cruel. I’m not promulgating simple, easy ideas. The ideas I wish to communicate are big hunkin’ monsters of ideas. I’m a damn good lecturer, but I get the feeling that my lectures go soaring over the heads of most of my audiences. I conclude, then, that anybody who can’t read my text wouldn’t understand the material in other media.
Audio is an especially weak medium of communication. People urge me to make podcasts for easy consumption. It’s true that audio is easy to make, distribute and consume. I can make a podcast by just yakking into a microphone. You can listen to a podcast while driving your car or washing dishes. But that is in fact the problem: audio is so light in weight that you don’t need to devote much mental energy to digesting it. A podcast washes over your mind like a gentle breeze; my ideas are like an avalanche of huge boulders. People who prefer gentle breezes wouldn’t enjoy avalanches anyway.
Video is easily the most abused medium. YouTube is awash in what I’ll call video podcasts. These are the same gentle breezes in podcasts, only now they are accompanied by a talking head. I was recently directed to a particularly ironic YouTube video in which two fellows discuss the notion that podcasts make the spoken word just as powerful as the written word. What’s ironic about this is the fact that the video adds absolutely NOTHING to the discussion. It’s just two guys wearing headphones talking to each other.
To grasp just how idiotic this video is, I suggest a simple experiment. Here’s another video. Turn off the sound on your computer while you watch the video. The value of the video is diminished somewhat, but you can still get a lot of value out of it without the audio. Now do the same thing with the video discussion above. Without the audio, the video is a complete waste of time. As an artist, I am infuriated by the abuse of the medium these two fellows perpetrate.
If you’re going to use video, then USE THE GODDAMN VIDEO!!!! Show things that are moving around, changing in visually interesting ways. Here’s a video I made to explain the concept of interactivity. I won’t tout it as a great video or even a good video; my only claim is that it is a competent video. It has lots of visual variety for the eye, and the imagery is used to (wonder of wonders!) help communicate the message. The imagery is part of the message, not window dressing. True, there’s some talking head stuff in there, but at least the talking head has some supporting facial expressions and gestures.
Cost of production
The second major factor is the time required to produce material in different media. This essay will take about two hours to write. My interactivity video linked to above took me about 50 hours to produce. Perhaps that’s because I’m not adept at making videos; perhaps if I were as a good a video-maker as I am a writer, I could have churned out that video in only 20 hours. Even so, that seven-minute video took up a lot of time.
Good video is certainly a lot more powerful than text. 150 million people have seen the Lord of the Rings movies; many fewer have read the books. But the movies cost $93 million to make, and I don’t have $93 million.
Ultimately, the choice between video and text, for me, is based on two considerations. First, do I in fact reach more people with my YouTube videos? Here’s a list of my most widely-viewed videos on YouTube:
The Dragon Speech: 4,449
Lecture #1: 1,697
Lecture #2: 1,130
Lecture #3: 680
Siboot Walkthrough: 1,200
Interactivity: 663
By comparison, most of the pages on my website get only a few hundred hits, and many of those are spiders. This evidence suggests that I am indeed better off making videos.
But there’s another consideration: do I have enough time to prepare videos for all the ideas I wish to communicate? I doubt it. My project list is still very long, and it includes several books. I’m approaching my 70th birthday; how much longer will I be mentally strong enough to make good videos?
Conclusion
All this leads me to conclude that the bulk of my output should be text, but I should express some of my ideas in video form. Only the most readily digested material, stuff that the hoi polloi can handle, should go to video form.