Smartphones, the internet and social networks like TikTok have changed this situation rapidly and completely. It is now common that when someone wants to launch an idea into the world, they do not pick up a keyboard and type, but turn on a camera and talk. For many young people, video may be the 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, the way we think, and what we think. about. 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?

For starters, I would argue, it helps us share knowledge that used to be damn hard to capture in text. For example, I’m a long-distance cyclist, and when I need to fix my bike, I don’t read a guidebook. I look for a video explanation. When it comes to expressing or absorbing knowledge that’s visual, physical, or proprioceptive, the moving image wins almost every time. Athletes don’t read a text description of what they did wrong in the last race; they watch the clips. Hence the enormous popularity, on video platforms, of instructional videos — makeup tutorials, cooking demonstrations. (Or even learn-to-code stuff: I learned Python by to look (programmers do it.)

Video is also no longer just about broadcasting, but about conversation: it’s a way of responding to others, notes Raven Maragh-Lloyd, the author of Black network resistor and a professor of film and media studies at Washington University. “We’re seeing a rise in audience participation,” she notes, including people doing “duets” on TikTok or reaction videos on YouTube. Everyday creators are seeing video platforms as ways to talk back to power.