The smartphone, the internet and social networks like TikTok have changed this situation quickly and completely. If someone wants to throw an idea into the world, it is now common practice not to pull out a keyboard and type, but to turn on a camera and speak. For many young people, video is perhaps The best way to express ideas.
As media thinkers like Marshall McLuhan have said, a new medium changes us. It changes the way we learn, how we think – and what we think. to. When mass printing came along, it helped create a culture of news, mass literacy and bureaucracy, and – some argue – the idea of scientific evidence. So how will mass video change our culture?
First of all, I would say it helps us share knowledge that used to be damn hard to put into text form. For example, I’m a long-distance cyclist and when I need to fix my bike, I don’t read a manual. I look for an explanatory video. If you want to express or record visual, physical or proprioceptive knowledge, the moving image almost always wins. Athletes don’t read a text description of what they did wrong in the last game; they watch the clips. That’s why instructional videos are so popular on video platforms – makeup tutorials, cooking demonstrations. (Or even material for learning programming: I learned Python by watching Watch out Programmers do that.)
Video is no longer just about transmission, but about conversations – it is a way of responding to others, notes Raven Maragh-Lloyd, author of Black networked resistance and professor of film and media studies at Washington University. “We’re seeing a rise in audience participation,” she notes, including people making “duets” on TikTok or response videos on YouTube. Everyday creatives see video platforms as a way to contradict power.
