Smartphones, the Internet, and social networks like TikTok have changed this quickly and completely. Now, when we want to share our ideas with the world, we turn on our camera and speak, rather than picking up a keyboard and typing. For many young people, video may be the primary way they express their ideas.
As media thinkers like Marshall McLuhan have said, new media change us: they change how we learn, how we think, and what we think about. The advent of mass print helped create news culture, mass literacy, bureaucracy, and the very concept of scientific evidence. So how will mass video change our culture?
First of all, I would argue that it helps share knowledge that was previously very difficult to convey through text. For example, I'm a long-distance cyclist, and if I need to fix my bike, I don't read a guide; I look for a video explanation. If you want to express or absorb visual, physical, or proprioceptive knowledge, video almost always wins. An athlete doesn't read a text explanation of what went wrong in their last game; they watch a clip. That's why instructional videos are so popular on video platforms, like makeup tutorials or cooking demonstrations (or even coding learning materials; I learned Python by watching programmers do it).
And video is no longer just a broadcast; it's a conversation, a way to respond to others, says Raven Muller Lloyd, a professor of film and media studies at the University of Washington and author of Black Networked Resistance. “We're seeing more audience participation,” she notes, including people performing “duets” on TikTok and posting response videos on YouTube. Everyday creators see the video platform as a way to speak back to power.
