Has Video Killed the Radio Star?

In our most recent podcast with David Hsieh, the implications of video on current society were discussed.  On March 12, 1933 Franklin Roosevelt broke barriers by introducing a way to talk directly to the people with the first in a series of Fireside chats.  This tradition has been a staple of every successive president as a way to keep the public informed on the thoughts and goals of the president in their own words.  Now President elect Obama is taking the technology to the next level, to utilize video distributed by YouTube to the world.  In fact, just this week the Senate and the House of Representatives have launched their own YouTube sites to share the videos of any of their representatives.  Clearly the power of video to communicate directly to the people has reached the next plateau.

But while new technology is certainly more stimulating and has the potential to bring about new efficiencies and abilities; that is not always a given.  Just look at the movie industry desperately pushing 3D-movies and yet in many polls audiences are not so thrilled by this ‘new’ technology.  Let’s face it we started as a race with cave drawings and evolved to writing, are we now regressing?

So the question has to be asked, is more video necessarily better?

I personally experienced a culture shock when I graduated college and began a career at Cisco.  My non-engineering and even many engineering classes were evaluated by the documents we wrote to demonstrate knowledge, understanding and application.  Some challenged us to write in key formats or length to test how quickly we could come to a key idea (never a strong suit for me), others to do as in-depth and complete of an analysis as possible.  Upon entering the corporate world, Word was rapidly replaced by PowerPoint.  No work was done in Word, rather if I needed to convey an idea to either Engineering to Marketing it was done in slide format.  While a picture does say a thousand words, it seems counter-intuitive to create product overviews and requirement documents in picture format.

Yet who among us has not purchased some product with “some assembly required” and then had to struggle with text directions that are somehow supposed to help.  Where ten pages of intricate technical tutorial could have been replaced by a 5 minute video demonstration.  Take this to the corporate world of training on everything from new medical devices, to retail techniques, to improved education tools, to examine security footage and we can see that the learning curve can be dramatically higher using more rich formats rather than just a document which may or may not be read with full attention.  In these cases, trying to describe is clearly not nearly as beneficial as showing.

While media and of course companies would like us all to believe that video is superior than audio and probably better than straight text in all things, maybe we need to challenge sometimes.  While video holds tremendous potential to bring customized content right to my desk, possibly there is still an intellectual experience in the written word or audio that challenges us to use our own imagination and take ideas to new places?  That to read allows us also to contemplate and interrogate?

So I applaud and participate in the movement of rich video that has changed nearly all parts of how and where we get information, however let us not lose the details and the wonder of the written word in the search for images.

Posted by Matthew Stein at 09:00AM PST