30th September 2024
In the beginning was the Word.
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Well, in the beginning there were words.
Lots of words, all over the place, at the beginning of the internet and then of the World Wide Web.
And this was because words were easy: text was one of the easiest of things to transmit.
Early social media was thereby text-dominated.
Yes, there were rudimentary ways of hosting and sending pictures and video and sound files.
But with text you could create more text – while pictures and videos and sound files were difficult to create and edit.
Early-ish blogging, I can recall with a shudder, required you to code with HTML. You had to physically type in hyperlinks with <a> tags and so on.
Even on Facebook you only had a limited text field into which you could type: “So-and-so is [ ]”.
Pretty soon, however, there were WYSIWYG social media and blogging.
Anybody, if the wanted, could compose, create and even edit words on the screen.
And so text-based social media took off, especially on Twitter.
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As Marie Le Conte set out in a thought-provoking and insightful post on her Substack, this had the effect of lots of text-based social media users – writers and journalists – believing that social media was about them:
As she elaborates:
“…journalists are people who write for a living. Twitter is and was a place where thoughts are expressed in writing.”
And what she says about journalists can also be said about lawyers: the stuff of lawyering, like the stuff of journalism, is words.
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As the eminent jurist Eliza Doolittle once averred:
“Words! Words! Words!
I’m so sick of words!
I get words all day through;
First from him, now from you!
Is that all you blighters can do?”
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It was all that us blighters – journalists, lawyers, and so on – could do, and it suited us.
Social media seemed a perfect medium.
But.
Text-based social media was only the start – an early stage just because text was easy, and other forms were less easy.
And now the other forms are catching up, and indeed they have caught up.
Just as HTML-based blogging eased into WYSIWYG social media typing, it is becoming just as easy for a social user to make and edit video and audio.
This, coupled with the wayward way Twitter has gone (and so has been quit by many), means that the great days of text-based social users thinking they were special are perhaps over.
There will still be a place for text-based social media, just like there are those who persist with CB Radio.
But it was just a phase we were going through.
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I hope you’re wrong that text based communication is a passing phase. I much prefer to read an article rather than watch a podcast or a vlog for the simple reason that I can speed-read over any waffle or unnecessary detail in text (and almost everyone pads out their thoughts, even if it is to add background or explanation, like I have just done!) but I can’t do that with a podcast or a You Tube video. So I don’t watch them.
Plaintive call for us to not forget print (or any other tangible medium). People have been making hard copy for several thousand years, at least since it meant cutting wedge shapes into clay (then magically preserved when palaces burned down and soft clay tablets were inadvertently fired into ceramic .. time can do unpredictable stuff).
Books. Please, people, don’t stop writing and publishing books.
As a photographer, I look at this generation’s images and wonder how they will last. It’s been said that likely no generation will leave as few images behind for posterity as ours, although no generation will have produced more, because it’s all on phones we chuck away, or in the cloud, or on social media platforms that don’t survive. I’d hate to think this generation’s words would go the same way.
Well, some of them. In the beginning was the word. Then people discovered that using them well was hard work, and started writing junk. We don’t want everything to survive.
Oh, as someone involved in early video streaming and who had great hopes for the medium I wholeheartedly disagree with your analysis. The problem specifically with video is you cannot quickly learn the content – even where there are menus guiding you through what is in the video you don’t know if it contains what you need. The trouoble with moving pictures is that they move and so does the sound attached to them, switch off for one second and you miss what you have spent ages trying to find – BUT text never moves – if you switch off you go back and read the bit you weren’t paying attention to. As a retired academic give me words any day of the week I can skim read words without missing anything important – the equivalent of ff on video and get to what I want far quicker with words than pictures.
By George, I think I’ve go it!
I’m not in love (with social media) and it may well have been just a (silly) phase we were going through.
A famous avant garde film director (whom I shall not name) once declared that we are in the Age of the Screen. From cinema , smart TVs, tablets to mobiles that seems to be true. Not just for “movies” etc, but for most other media/information including text of course. Unfortunately many people, myself included , find long scrolls of screen text more difficult and tiring to read compared to paper so the short “micro blogging ” formats tend tend be more popular. For the substacks/blogs etc that I follow, I mostly read on a 32 inch screen but still often have to pause between sections of a longer piece , while a paper version would be much easier to read.