YouTube and the death of literacy

New Year's Eve is traditionally time to look back, so here's about the only cogent observation I can come up with for the end of the year: 2007 is the year that video started taking over the web. In 2005, video was almost entirely trapped in the realm of proprietary codecs and plugins, hidden away as QuickTime downloads or Windows streaming media, behind nasty UIs with checkboxes for your connection speed and preferred format. Last year, Flash video became widespread, and, of course, YouTube was sold for a fortune to Google.

This year, embedded video is everywhere. Some blogs seem to be half-full of Flash previews, and it's beginning to be a minefield browsing my delicious network; an interesting sounding link will turn out to be an hour and a half lecture on Google Video. All the criticisms I no doubt made of podcasting on the spool, somewhere, apply here, but even more so: who has 90 minutes to concentrate on a presentation, every day or two? (If you can really absorb information in the background, you're obviously way better at multitasking than I am; congratulations.)

Meanwhile, the Guardian and other newspapers have video on their front pages every now and again, and video adverts on their stories as often or not (or so it sometimes seemed). (As Tom noted on the spool, this might be backwards.) The BBC's audio and video, stuck in the pre-Flash world, regularly gets stick for not moving to the exciting new way of bombarding everyone with moving images, whether they want them or not.

There's beginning to be more and more worry about the twilight of books, and indeed literacy. That New Yorker article goes on to note:

The Internet, happily, does not so far seem to be antagonistic to literacy. Researchers recently gave Michigan children and teen-agers home computers in exchange for permission to monitor their Internet use. The study found that grades and reading scores rose with the amount of time spent online. Even visits to pornography Web sites improved academic performance. Of course, such synergies may disappear if the Internet continues its YouTube-fuelled evolution away from print and toward television.

This wouldn't really be that much of a change, I suppose; as the article says elsewhere, television and radio have been resurrecting orality at the expense of literacy for the best part of a century. The web seems to be recapping the history of mass publishing from the first primitive printing presses, to HDTV, at breakneck speed; what took five centuries is being replayed in two decades.

Given we still don't really understand the changes that happen to society when movable type (the metal sort, not the software package) was invented (I've seen people arguing it led to the 150 years of religious turmoil in Europe centred on the Reformation, and others highlighting its role in the Enlightenment; probably it contributed massively to both), I can see why people need to be concerned about what the effects of such a shift are. I believe this is what Doris Lessing's Nobel acceptance speech was trying to ask, in a passage that was widely misunderstood by web 2.0 boosters:

The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: "What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?" In the same way, we never thought to ask, "How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?"

The move to a post-literate society may be inevitable, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be spending some time thinking about what it means. In the meantime, I'll be sitting at the back, grousing when discussion relies on you having watched the latest viral nonsense, and hoping that there'll still be books, full-length blog posts, and interesting articles for me to read.