Who wins battle of video, written word?
When you want to know what the current price of gold is, do you want a tutorial about gold before the figure is given to you?
I don’t think so.
I was looking for something online yesterday. I had a question I wanted answered. The first three items to come up on the topic were videos.
I did not want to spend one, two, or three minutes watching videos that slowly tell me something that might not even include the answer to the question I needed answered.
I just wanted a number. Bing, bang, boom, done. Except it wasn’t fast. It was the opposite of fast.
Even as the Internet goes more and more to video, there is a place for statistics. There is a place for the written word. I can read a column like this much faster than watching a video of me speaking these words.
There would be irony in a video. Do a video complaining about too many videos? Really.
There is a crying need for the written word. There is a crying need for speed. If your job is anything like mine, you are expected to do more and more in less and less time.
Watching videos does not help me out in most cases.
The logical conclusion is the written word will survive. It might even thrive after we get beyond the simplistic narrative that video is the future and the written word is the past.
My words might seem like a selfish defense of an outmoded means of communication, like a newspaper, but remember, I was looking for written information online.
Economic value will eventually sort things out into spheres. What is the cheapest means of achieving a certain business goal? The written word, or video?
The future will have a place for both. It is not a matter of one thing replacing another. It is a matter of at what point will an equilibrium be established?
When newspapers were the new-fangled items, they began to crowd into a space occupied by merchants mixing in the coffeehouses of London and Amsterdam.
Ships sailing. Ships arriving. Cargoes being sold. Any trader in goods needed to have this information so as not to get caught with expensive merchandise when a huge cargo of identical merchandise docked.
Money makes the world go around. It will sort out what the best uses are for video and the written word.
If Russia dumps its gold reserves, a three-word headline – “Russia dumps gold” – is all I need to see.
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