What is Multimedia?
How many hours a day are we spending consuming multimedia? Why does it matter how much multimedia we are consuming? These two questions define the flow of information, especially digital information in our internet age, and control the ways in how we receive information. Thus, we attempt to answer: Why does multimedia matter?
First, we have to create a definition of multimedia. What is multimedia compared 'single-media'? I think that a comparison can be made be between silent films and talkies. In a silent film, the flow of information comes only through one of our senses, sight, and is therefore limited by the speed of processing through this single sense. If there is dialogue presented through text, we cannot process it at the same time as the action. Think of captioned videos too, reading the text and watching the action could be presented at the same time, but anyone who enjoys foreign films will know that processing the text and action are individual thoughts, not simultaneous. Now take a look at talkies, videos with both sound and sight. We use two senses to engage in information. Dialogue can happen at the same time as action, and we are able to process it simultaneously as we process anything in real life simultaneously; we are not limited by the technology of the singular media.
In this definition then, we are expanding the traditional definition of multimedia from "many mediums", the literal definition of the word, to many mediums that can be processed by the brain simultaneously. In this case, a multimedia work must be able to deliver more information in the same amount of time as a singular media work.
The New Multimedia
To answer our question about why multimedia matters, I must explain the reason of this post. Social media, through the consumption of short videos (reels, shorts, TikTok) is a completely new form of multimedia. Short videos are no longer a part of the same medium as social media is broadly. Short videos hold this intermedium space, where news, entertainment, education, combine together to form an odd conglomerate of needs that were previously held by multiple mediums. It is also a step forwards into a multimedia that uses a third sense: the sense of sped up time.
Short videos, looked at individually, is just another form of talkies, a video with sound. Taking sound and video together, the use of two mediums of our senses, to deliver information far faster than just reading text or listening to audio. However, the third sense of short videos can be seen when short videos are taken into the context of their consumption. Short videos are to be consumed one after another, with various topics, and designed to be consumed in great quantity.
Short videos are not singular pieces of media. Because they are designed to be consumed with other short videos on the conglomerate of topics, they fill many niches. The evening news has been replaced with short videos on news. Movie trailers have been replaced with short videos with movie clips. Opinion pieces and essays have been replaced with short videos on everything from world events to financial analysis. Academic topics, and I say this very broadly, pop-academic topics, have been replaced with short videos on quasi-academic topics.
The third sense of the short video is the speed in which you can watch a clip of a movie trailer, and then watch a clip of Mormons evangelizing, and then watch a clip of half clothed ladies dancing, and then finally a clip of the newest analysis on politics. Within the span of seconds, and through multiple sense of sight and sound, you are able to consume information at a speed in which, even a couple of years ago, you would have needed multiple webpages, books, magazines, and a trip to the local library.
Thus, we are now consuming a new form of multimedia. No longer bounded by two mediums, I argue that the speed of topics constitutes a new medium, the medium of time. The New Multimedia then advances the speed of information, of sight and sound, through the immense flow content that we are able to consume.
Adverse effects of the New Multimedia framework: Prosumption and Profit
Going back to our questions Why does multimedia matter? and How many hours a day are we consuming multimedia? I want to propose a new question: Why does the (over) consumption of the New Multimedia matter?
The New Multimedia (short videos) through the rapid rate of topics presented at such short amount of time, sounds like it gives us the opportunity to become educated with the topics of the world in mere seconds, with relative ease through our devices. And I would agree. It's true that the New Multimedia through short videos can be used this way, however, with the current setup of short videos as entertainment (and ad revenue), it is not being used in this way at all.
The devices and frameworks that the New Multimedia is being produced on and consumed on promotes two key modes of operation: prosumption and profit.
The New Multimedia is designed to be produced and consumed by the same people, an endless cycle of new items to consume and the same people to produce them, and then with this cycle of prosumption, money to be made through adverts. The only piece of the New Multimedia puzzle that is not made through prosumption.
I want to end this post by zooming out to look at a wider picture of mediums and the rate of the consumption of information. Physical mediums such as the printed word, moving on to books with diagrams, silent films, talkies, videos --- and now advancing to such a rate of information transfer that the very topic of information is being blurred. We need to remove the New Multimedia from this prosumptive framework, a framework for generating profits, and into a framework to harness this new rate of information. A framework that provides us with the information that we need to live our lives more effectively and interconnected with each other. The New Multimedia should not be feared as destroying our brains and attention spans. A new technology always has that fear, but instead as the tool that it is to most effectively connect information to our brains. We just need to use it properly.
Hello, I'm a big fan of Owen Phillipson. While I am here, procrastinating my need to write two papers about Owen, I wanted to tell you that I think you might want to reconsider your perspective on the value of the "New Multimedia." That is: I disagree with your claim that the rapidity with which it is able to distribute information is a good thing in that it "provides us with the information that we need to live our lives more effectively and (be) interconnected with each other."
ReplyDeleteDuring the genesis of the internet, many political philosophers were idealistic about its capacity to improve our lives. And yes, it does seem intuitive that intaking more information leads to living better lives and more fully understanding one another. After all, don't most disagreements stem, at least in some way, from a lack of information between the disagreeing parties? With the overwhelming amount of information we now have access to (especially now at its most extreme with short-form videos), has our world improved? No, it seems, and in many ways it has gotten worse.
You claim that the issue is not the "New Multimedia" of short-form content itself, but the prosumptive profit-generating model in which it operates. However, is this truly the case? For someone who curates their feed to only be given high-quality, educational short video content (and avoids half-naked women, Reddit stories with Subway Surfers gameplay, and other "brainrot"), are they becoming smarter and learning to live their life more effectively? Does the speed with which one can intake educational Instagram reels make it a superior medium compared to reading educational books?
I contend that, even in only watching the highest-quality, most educational short-form video content, it can never substitute the knowledge that can be garnered by engaging with longer-form content. By engaging with short-form video as our primary source of information, we can never synthesize knowledge with the same thoroughness and intimacy as we can with long-form media. Receiving information is not the same thing as acquiring knowledge. Given the high stimulus and necessary rapidity of short-form content, even when one feels like they're learning a ton, the information often goes "in one ear and out the other."
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There is a reason that most academic university courses assign dozens of pages per week instead of giving students a "checklist" summary of a writer's ideas. One can only come to understand the nuances of an author's argument as they develop over the course of dozens of pages (or, at least, over a longer span than 1 minute of talking). There is a certain value to, say, reading Plato's Republic instead of watching short videos on Plato's "main points". Knowledge necessitates exercising one's attention span and critically engaging with an author's voice over a longer form of time. The point of reading the Republic and many other academic works is not just to hear the author's conclusions, but the intellectually-enriching process of following their rhetoric and understanding the steps and nuances of their arguments. That is how knowledge is truly acquired -- not by being algorithmically-fed a rapid and random array of factoids and summaries. Then, given the slow process of working through the steps of an author's argument, one is better equipped to construct their own arguments. It also seems that, in order to be more "interconnected" with one another, we ought to develop long-form thinking, reading, and writing capacities so that we can work through the nuances that subtly inform different social, economic, and political perspectives.
ReplyDeleteSo, yes, I think that the "New Multimedia" IS destroying our brains and attention spans. There is consensus from psychological research that our attention spans have significantly lowered in the past couple decades. Yes, our phones ARE expertly-engineered to steal our attention and garner as much profit as possible. And yes, most of the short-form content that people consume is not high-quality and educational. Even still, the rapid rate of information of short-form video makes the medium inferior for acquiring knowledge and developing our intellectual capacities than long-form media, which encourages us to move at a slower, more methodical rate.
There are some other advantages I could talk about (such as the advantages of working through only text VS. the stimulating combination of text, audio, and video), but I will leave it there for now.
I will leave you, Mr. Yang, with a relevant quote from Nietzsche's 1881 book "Daybreak":
“Besides, we are friends of the lento, I and my book. I have not been a philologist in vain — perhaps I am one yet: a teacher of slow reading. I even come to write slowly. At present it is not only my habit, but even my taste — a perverted taste, maybe — to write nothing but what will drive to despair every one who is ‘in a hurry.’ For philology is that venerable art which exacts from its followers one thing above all — to step to one side, to leave themselves spare moments, to grow silent, to become slow — the leisurely art of the goldsmith applied to language: an art which must carry out slow, fine work, and attains nothing if not lento. Thus philology is now more desirable than ever before; thus it is the highest attraction and incitement in an age of ‘work’: that is, of haste, of unseemly and immoderate hurry-skurry, which is so eager to ‘get things done’ at once, even every book, whether old or new. Philology itself, perhaps, will not so hurriedly ‘get things done.’ It teaches how to read well, that is, slowly, profoundly, attentively, prudently, with inner thoughts, with the mental doors ajar, with delicate fingers and eyes. My patient friends, this book appeals only to perfect readers and philologists: learn to read me well!”
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