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VIDEO | Noah Brier

Connectedness, Not Content

With video on the web, it's not about what you're saying, it's about how it's said.

July 31, 2006 | RSS | EMAIL | PRINT | 5 COMMENTS

For as long as I remember it's been my feeling that part of what made the internet so powerful was that it finally gave us a way to understand networks. Prior to the web, networks were mostly invisible and we didn't have a great grasp of how they worked.

The problem with my argument was that I didn't really ever have anything to back it up. I mean, I had my understanding, but I hadn't ever read anything that explicitly spelled things out this way.

Today I finished Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What it Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life. The book cemented my thinking with lots of real examples of how the web opened up our understanding of complex networks. The afterword summed things up perfectly for me:

I am repeatedly asked a few basic questions when I lecture about networks: Why did it take this long? Why did we have to wait until 1999 to discover the impact of hubs and power laws on the behavior of complex networks? The answer is simple: We lacked a map. The few network maps available for study before the late 1990s had a few hundred nodes at most. The enormous World Wide Web offered the first chance to examine the intricate anatomy of large complex systems and established the presence of power laws. As other large maps followed, we gradually understood that most networks of practical interest, from the language to the sex web, are shaped by the same universal laws and therefore share the same hub-dominated architecture.

In case you didn't feel like reading that, my bigger point is that whatever it is we take away from the surface web (say watching videos or reading blog entries), the structure is equally important to our understanding. You might even say the medium is the message.

Think of it this way: The message is the bright shiny object, the low-hanging fruit. It's the 3 minute YouTube video of the guy lighting his farts on fire. It's the thing that makes you laugh. The medium, however, is also communicating some very strong messages, letting you know that you can find entertainment on new screens, that three minutes is the ideal time for your shortened-attention span, that if that idiot can light his farts and get 70,000 people to watch it, so can you.

Most everyone concentrates on the message, and rightly so, those watching the video most likely don't care about the deeper repercussions. Much of that communication is covert. The thing is, if you want to understand what's really going on and make something meaningful, you need to be in touch with that covert communication.

Here's how McLuhan broke it down:

What I am saying is that new media may at first appear as mere codes of transmission for older achievement and established patterns of thought. But nobody could make the mistake of supposing that phonetic writing merely made it possible for the Greeks to set down in visual order what they had thought and known before writing. In the same way printing made literature possible. It did not merely encode literature.

And here it is in plain english:



WATCH IT ON YOUTUBE

Word to that.

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COMMENTS

1Adam Elend

Good point.

Where you put your content is as important to the message you are conveying as the content itself.

I think as the medium becomes more mainstream, this will balance out and content will matter more.

The same could be said of blogging as a medium, with language instead of video... but with blogging I think we're at a tipping point (or close to it) where content matters more.

July 31, 2006

2Noah Brier

I'm not sure I completely agree that we're at a tipping point. Sure, we're getting more comfortable with the medium and accepting it as its own form of writing/thinking, but only then can we actually experiment and see where it can take us. The content will change and may become more of the focus, but that's only because we understand how it works within the frame of the medium.

On a kind of related note, I really liked Aarow Swartz's explanation of blogging: "I don't consider this writing, I consider this thinking. I like sharing my thoughts and I like hearing yours and I like practicing expressing ideas, but fundamentally this blog is not for you, it's for me. I hope that you enjoy it anyway." He understands it as fundamentally different that the regular writing excercise. That's cool.

July 31, 2006

3charles gallant

Awesome post. One example that keeps coming to mind is the font example. If you wrote this whole blog post in bright red font, with a black background, all in bold capital letters, it would change the meaning of it. The medium would dictate the message. You'd be angry.

As we continually add publishing tools to our arsenal (such as video posting sites, new and exciting fonts, content management systems, etc), I think that our understanding of how the network is modifying our messages will be ultimately important.

July 31, 2006

4CK

great post -- and apropos to include video. Appreciate the comments, too (both Aarow's take on blogging as 'thinking vs. writing' and Charles' font example).

August 1, 2006

5R

the Swartz quote sums up what i've been thinking forever. thanks Noah.

Both Content and Medium are equally important. When they're in sync we see great things. When one is further ahead then the other we see great people try to even-them-out (on purpose or as a consequence of trying something new).

August 1, 2006