Not Ready For The Camera

Recently, a lot of the discussions we’ve been having about technology have been shaped pretty sharply around social media, particularly around what the next generation “wants” from a social network.

Are we going to all lean on video? Do we need visuals? Is text the ultimate gold standard?

A pretty-good comment I spotted this week from journalist Sophia Smith Galer suggested that the problem with Bluesky was that it was a throwback popular with journalists, and it was giving journalists yet another excuse to ignore the clear popularity of video with audiences. To me, the key paragraph was this:

Social media video drives far more interactions than a text post, and that’s why platforms love it. More interactions = more time spent in app = more advertising money. Famously, journalists have been incredibly slow to pivot to video platforms. A minority make their own Instagram and TikTok videos; I was an early adopter, but still remain one of a small few regularly doing it.

Fair point, and she is not alone in making it, but I think my response to this is pretty simple: Does one format have to “win” over the others?

To be clear, I don’t think she’s wrong that video has found a lot of success with audiences and those who have found an affinity with it benefit from the format. But I also think it threatens to be a bit narrow in terms of the framing of social media.

For one thing, looking at engagement levels around video misses a few things. For one, requiring people to be “camera-ready” to engage in social media limits who can engage in it. Consider how cable television, for example, artificially limits the kind of people who can have a presence in a monocultural conversation—to get time on CNN, media training is basically a requirement.

Dashing off a few snarky takes in a text-based platform, meanwhile, only needs a phone. But with video-based social media, you’re once again setting parameters on the discussion. You’re required to think about setting, tone, and voice. You’re forced to separate out your creative process from your production process. You have to also be comfortable talking in front of a camera—and a lot of folks out there simply aren’t media-trained.

Stutter? Struggle to organize your thoughts? English isn’t your first language? Have a disability? That could potentially close some important doors.

A good way to think about why this is a problem is to approach your average journalist or creative person as a character in a video game RPG. In RPGs, characters have different attributes that can be focused on and favored—some may be good at defense, some offense, some magic, some stamina.

If you can create with a camera and are skilled with other parts of the creative process, you have an advantage. (Aaron Weiss/Unsplash)

This applies to the skill sets of creators. Some may have strong research chops but would struggle to convey those thoughts on camera. Others can write really well or draw effective visuals, but may not speak super-well. (Unfair as it is, our culture judges speaking ability very heavily, as proven by the challenges Joe Biden, a known stutterer, faced during his presidency.) Others have a natural charisma—the camera or microphone loves them—but maybe need some help with the what-to-say element of the equation. Others still serve important organizational or behind-the-scenes roles, but would never dare be the star of the show.

The full package, from a journalistic perspective, is rare. And that’s OK. A diverse media ecosystem can make room for everyone.

However, video-based social media, for all its strengths as an engagement tool, does tend to ask for a certain full-package kind of creator. Think of the people in your life that can effectively write and speak effectively and come up with ideas and manage the nagging technical elements. Think of all the people who get left out of that equation when that is what’s being asked, or how much overhead that ends up requiring long-term. If the internet is intended as a modern exchange of ideas, video is a problem because of all the people it ultimately leaves out.

I think the internet grew in prominence because it asked little from its users from a self-publishing perspective. By forcing multimedia experiences for “engagement” reasons, we are now asking for all those things back, and that just feels like a mistake to me.

(And to be clear, this goes both ways: Becca Farsace, a great video creator who recently left The Verge, cited her weaknesses as a writer, and how that left her at a disadvantage for getting the chance to do prominent reviews, as one of the reasons she left the site to go solo.)

There’s also the audience element of this equation, however. Many users just prefer text, or feel uncomfortable with the very addictive nature of modern digital video. One look at Reddit or Hacker News, not even considering Twitter or Bluesky, shows that text is far from dead. If our goal is to reach audiences, only offering or favoring video leaves a lot of people out. We have a diversity of preferences out there, and unless you’re running a multinational news outlet, you don’t need to be on absolutely every single platform.

And finally, it is important to consider the level of control video gives platforms. Because video is so much harder to reliably produce and distribute than text, it makes us more dependent on them for distribution, and that often leaves us in the arms of platforms that may not have our best interests at heart. Much as Facebook favored a “pivot to video” in the mid-2010s, what’s stopping them from weighting AI-created content over all else? It’s not exactly far-fetched.

The “pivot to video” was a binary misunderstanding of the nuanced culture of the internet, and for the sake of a diverse internet culture, we need to stop making that mistake.

To be clear, I have been known to like a good video or two—I link videos in Tedium constantly, and many hit on unusual concepts. And I applaud anyone who can do like Smith Galer, and fill that whole-package quota really well. (Someone who comes to mind off the bat is Mignon Fogarty, whose Grammar Girl touches on every one of these elements perfectly.)

Ultimately, videos or podcasts serve a different form of communication than a text-based social network does. For instance, you can push and pull on a hot take far more easily with text than you can with video. And you can interact with people in real time and it can shape your thinking as you forge an idea.

Asking a bunch of writers to switch gears and become multimedia creators means we gradually close doors to one of the most open media environments we’ve ever had.

It’s OK to focus on one medium over another, whether as a creator or a consumer. Not everyone has the “full package.” (Plus, you don’t have to clean your room as much when you skeet.)