You can keep your talking heads

April 26, 2008

With the rise of cheap cameras and YouTube it’s more and more common to see video, talking commentary in the place of written text. There’s Bloggingheads of course, and TPM.tv. My brother does a spot or two occasionally. And some mechanisms are even being developed for leaving video comments on blogs.

That’s fine for the people who like video, although it would be good to see some information on how quickly and widely this is catching on.

What Thord Hedengren’s criticisms of video comments is true for amateur video punditry as well. It takes much more time to consume video than it does to read text. I’d also like to add that video, properly produced, takes more time than writing the same words.

There are three other problems with video.

First, video consumes a significant amount of attention. If I’m at work and want to watch a video, I have to stop what I’m doing, plug in my headphones, sit, and watch. I can’t listen to anything else — in fact, I have to isolate myself from other sounds — and I can’t interrupt my viewing easily and scan back to the part where I stopped.

Secondly, you have to consume video linearly. When I’m reading a long post I’ll frequently go back and reread earlier passages to make sure I understood correctly. I can skip ahead a bit if I find a meandering paragraph or two. And (like Hedengren) I like being able to scan a written document to see if it’s interesting enough to spend more time on it. You can’t do that with video.

And third — it’s far more difficult to respond to video than respond to text. Citing either requires video editing or transcribing speech, either of which are time consuming. Or you have to give a particular marker: “go watch this video and the interesting bit starts at around 4:33.” It’s hard enough to get people to follow a link to an article, I can’t imagine most people drop what they’re doing to watch a video and fidget with the scrub bar.

Of course there’s a place for video. Video can communicate things that the written word can’t. There’s more immediacy to video. It’s easier to communicate personality. You can incorporate visual cues and facial expressions and audio.

But for videos to be worth the effort to watch, they have to make use of the advantages they have over the written word to make up for the disadvantages. And, of course, it’s going to take a fair amount of text to convince me to hit the play button in the first place.

Posted in Blogosphere