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Research, Technology, and Teamwork blog by Susie Wee

A glimpse of Video 2.0

Published 21 February 2007, 08:00 PM

These posts [0, 1, 2] link to a very thought-provoking YouTube video that has been spreading like wildfire this month.

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us
by Professor Michael Wesch
Asst Professor of Cultural Anthropology
Kansas State University

The video gets to the heart of Web 2.0 in 4 mins and 31 secs!

This raises a few interesting questions about video...

  • Is video the new way to express ourselves?
  • Could we have expressed this message as effectively with text and images?
  • When will video capture and editing tools undergo the 2.0 revolution that text has gone through? (as Michael shows so well in this video!)
  • Could this be Video 2.0? [3,4,5]

Here is an interesting interview with Michael.

UPDATE
Jamie Beckett made an interesting comment, which spurred me to add some more thoughts on Video 2.0.  I'll copy them here. [note: Is this (im)proper blog etiquette?]

  1. A video takes time to watch, so it has to cross a higher threshold to make you decide to watch it.
  2. Video needs to be "glance-able" so that with a quick glance you can decide if you want to spend time watching it. The glance-able view might not just be video, but perhaps a combination of text, images, video, and audio.
  3. Video summarization and video search tools are important, especially when we get to where we have "too much of it", as you said.
  4. Bonus: Video services have to be personalized so they give you the video that is right for you, given your knowledge and background and what you are looking for and trying to do. Is a personalized video service part of Video 2.0 or Video 3.0?


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Comments

The video was entertaining, but if you ask me, that video and many others take several minutes (or longer) to simply tell you something you either (1) already know or (2) could have read in one sentence in a few seconds. In time, video will become like text -- there will just be too much of it. Maybe by then we'll have something new.
# Thursday, February 22, 2007 11:56 PM by Jamie Beckett
Jamie- You hit on a number of critical issues for Video 2.0: 1. A video takes time to watch, so it has to cross a higher threshold to make you decide to watch it. 2. Video needs to be "glance-able" so that with a quick glance you can decide if you want to spend time watching it. The glance-able view might not just be video, but perhaps a combination of text, images, video, and audio. 3. Video summarization and video search tools are important, especially when we get to where we have "too much of it", as you said. 4. Bonus: Video services have to be personalized so they give you the video that is right for you, given your knowledge and background and what you are looking for and trying to do. Is this personalized video part of Video 2.0 or Video 3.0? Thanks for the comment!
# Friday, February 23, 2007 05:48 AM by Susie Wee
Marc Davis at UC Berkeley wrote an interesting paper a few years back titled "Garage cinema and the future of media technology" in which he mentions Jeffrey Sampsons work on the taxonomy of writing systems. Jeffrey classified writing into two categories: Semasiographic (from semantics-meanings) that use pictures and Glottiographic (from the glottis-sounds) that used an alphabet. Early communication was Semasiographic. For instance, cavemen drew pictures of hunting scenes and Marc's paper has a nice picture of a Siberian letter written using pictures. However, Semasiography (requiring more time, skill, images, a video camera, bandwidth) lagged behind Glottiography (required only an alphabet and a printing press). That has changed in the last ten years and we are now at a point in history where it is probably as easy and cheap to produce a home video as to compose a document (besides, cameras "boot" faster and are cheaper than a PC). So, it looks like human beings are going to increasingly communicate more with pictures(and video) as they did at the beginning of human civilization and less with words.
# Thursday, March 01, 2007 09:32 AM by Krishnan Ramanathan
rkrish67- Thanks for adding the historical perspective and linking it to the ease of content creation. This reminds me of another advantage of images and video over text, images and video are often language independent (though this particular video is not). Having a universal language is especially important as we continue our march towards globalization.
# Thursday, March 01, 2007 11:43 AM by Susie Wee
Video may be better for communicating certain things, like processes which are difficult to describe through the use of text or language. It also may be the most "natural" means of such communication, since humans likely learned observation well before language.Video does not require audio (language) or visual (text) symbol translation. The only problem with communicating with video is that it requires the viewer to have a cultural or experiential context in order to translate it into something useful.
# Wednesday, March 07, 2007 11:55 PM by 08GamerTwo
Interesting points, 08GamerTwo. I don't fully understand your last sentence on having "a cultural or experiential context". Sounds intriguing, though. Can you expand?
# Friday, March 09, 2007 03:45 PM by Susie Wee

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