I grew up in an era of print. We are now living in an era increasingly of video. What are the implications for public speakers and communications in general? Following are a series of axioms that I hope will provoke you to respond with insights of your own, in the (written) comments below.
Print is fast. Video is slow but speeding up. One of my pet peeves with video is how inefficient and slow it is for conveying information. The cliché says that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’, but my experience is exactly the opposite. I find it painfully difficult to watch documentaries because it takes so long for the medium to impart the same amount of information I could devour in a brief article in a few minutes. But there is no question that video is speeding up. We are developing a video vernacular that moves much faster and more economically in 2022 than it did in, say, 1995. Movies from the 90s seem to crawl at a pace that makes them nearly unwatchable compared to today’s films — unless of course we are talking about emotional impact or visual beauty, and then time is not important, is it?
A recent study found that students could absorb as much information watching a video of a lecture at twice the speed (roughly 300 words per minute) of normal speech. It’s a surprising finding because the limit was thought to be 275 words per minute, based on earlier studies. But the research suggests that we have still faster video to come. (And of course there is a difference between the video vernacular at its most economical and effective versus merely filming a lecture.) Given that our information flow continues to increase in speed and volume, we’re going to need to be able to absorb still faster film speeds as video replaces print.
If it isn’t videoed, it hasn’t happened. Thanks to mobile phones, the amount of video of everything from baby’s first steps to successful climbs of Mount Everest is ballooning at a staggering clip. I have maybe a handful of pictures remaining from my childhood, and the earliest is probably one of me holding a toy train, a big grin on my face, at roughly age 2 — a moment for which I have no independent memory. My granddaughter’s image, at one year, is already recorded on daily pictures and videos that go way beyond anything possible or even imagined then. What will be the implications of this massive documentary deposit…
