Author: Hu Yong
Reprinted from: Economic Observer
Future expression: broken down and "played" down
On January 19, on the WeChat night of the 2021 WeChat Open Class Pro version, Zhang Xiaolong, senior vice president of Tencent and president of the WeChat business group, said that video expression will become a theme in the content field in the next decade.
"Although we don't know whether text or video represents the progress of human civilization, in terms of personal expression and consumption level, the era is moving towards video expression." Zhang Xiaolong said.
I carefully read Zhang Xiaolong’s "WeChat Open Class" and wrote a few comments in the circle of friends:
1. With the increase in the importance of video, the importance of text, a long-term practical means of network communication, continues to decline. With the fall of words and the rise of videos, it would be absurd for Zhang Xiaolong (or anyone else, including me) to pretend to know the long-term impact of this trend. The honest answer is that we don't even know.
2. The big social media platform has transformed itself into a video platform, not since WeChat, FB has already done this. Through algorithms, video dissemination is getting greater promotion. Therefore, we can ask Zhang Xiaolong, if video expression becomes the content theme of the next ten years, is it true that Tencent is also in a relationship. But he will definitely say that this change is user-driven and an organic change. Because FB answered exactly like this: the transformation of the platform just followed the users.
3. In history, writing was once the privilege of a few people. Now, surrounded by the omnipresence of video, we may see that text has once again become a game for a few people. Video caters to the bottom layer, and text meets the upper layer, but the lower-layer market is larger and will surely occupy the upper-layer market. Probably since the invention of the printing press, we have not seen a situation where social interests and preferences are determined on a large scale by the bottom.
4. So when FB and WeChat predict the end of text on their platforms, as a few text lovers, what should you do? First, cry as much as you want! Second, it's time to find a new social network.
A friend who left a message in my circle of friends said: If you worry too much, the text will continue to pass on. I replied: Whether a thing still exists, and whether it is mainstream are completely different things.
Another friend said: "Hey, I don't understand, the power of words can't be realized by so many human bodies." Yes, that's right. The sixth census in 2010 showed that China’s illiteracy rate was only 4.89%, but even when such a large area of Chinese people are literate, reading words is still a huge threshold, let alone expressing yourself in words .
Zhang Xiaolong said: "In the history of the Internet, personal expressions in the public domain have been evolving. At the earliest, you needed to write HTML to make web pages. Later, there were blogs, followed by short texts like Weibo. Now it is pictures. And short videos. The direction of evolution is to be more produced and consumed by ordinary people. So it will be shorter and more fragmented."
He even predicted that the next step in content format is live broadcasting. If the trend he said is established, then, imitate the description of popular culture by cultural elites for many years-the cultural products of modern society are endlessly "idiotic" in order to accommodate the lack of literacy and impatient consumers. And the low-end development of "mentally weakened", so it is a dumbing down process——
We can believe that personal expression in the future will be a process of short, broken, and "acting". Because short videos are obviously more intuitive to show yourself than words, live broadcasts don’t even need to be performed. You only need to set up a 360° webcam and move all kinds of fragments of life to the Internet anytime and anywhere for a crowd to watch. Enough.
Text: Triceratops wandering on a warming earth
It's not just Zhang Xiaolong who thinks this way.
As early as when mankind began to struggle for the expansion of a new global exchange forum, the outstanding thinker in the digital field Clay Shirky (Clay Shirky) put forward a convincing argument, asserting that the Internet will make us more creative— -Even if it is only a small part of the "cognitive surplus" of the public (Sheki’s two best-selling books "Ren Ren Times" and "Cognitive Surplus", both of which were translated into Chinese by me, and Ma Huateng wrote the second book Recommended order).
The result of making full use of the cognitive surplus is massamateurization, where countless amateur publishers begin to share content.
Facebook is the best example. While making everyone an author, it has also become the preferred medium for hundreds of millions of users around the world to share their opinions and life experiences. However, in a few years, the direction of creativity may be very different. Facebook believes that on its platform, text is going to the end. Mark Zuckerberg has already bet on the future of his social platform, which will depend on video and increasingly immersive forms, such as virtual reality.
Nicola Mendelsohn, head of Facebook's Europe, Middle East and Africa operations, went further, pointing out that statistics show that written text is almost obsolete, replaced by moving images and voices. Mendelssohn expressed a strong liking for the video expression, "In this world, there is so much information flooding us, and the best way to tell a story is actually video. It can convey more information in a faster time. More information. Therefore, the trend towards video actually helps us digest more information."
In fact, there is one thing she didn't say clearly: video can increase user time more than text, and it is easier to share, comment and like than text. The business model of Face-book relies on people clicking, sharing, and participating in content, no matter what it is about (memes, opinions, chicken soup, news, and gossip), and no matter what form it appears (text, image, audio, short video, Long video and live broadcast).
In a nutshell, Facebook's business is to let people share what interests them. As long as people participate and stay on the platform, there are many benefits to the platform. If people spend more time watching and interacting with videos, creators will create more video content, and the platform will also be more algorithmically tilted towards the video, which will eventually lead to a situation where the entire video "engulfs" the Internet.
When the video Internet is sweeping everything, it is difficult to tell whether it is user-driven or the result of platform transfer resource support. Anyway, users have always been good signs for Internet companies to engage in various behaviors.
Undoubtedly, Facebook said that it is user preferences that are driving the transfer from text to video, and perhaps that is true. But please consider that Facebook fully supports its real-time video service FacebookLive. And please note that FacebookLive is the content hosted and used through Facebook (not YouTube), not to mention all the money from Face-book video advertising.
Please draw your own conclusions. Then carefully consider the WeChat data given by Zhang Xiaolong and one of his inferences: "With the passage of time, video expression has actually become a habit of ordinary people. In the past 5 years, the number of video messages sent by users every day has increased. 33 times, the number of videos published in Moments of Friends increased by 10 times.” Zhang Xiaolong also said: “We never pay attention to the length of time users stay in WeChat. That is not our goal.”
I am afraid that the outside world does not think so. The battle for "fragmented" time is at the core of the battle between Douyin and WeChat on China Mobile's Internet (the latest news: Douyin has formally sued Tencent for restricting Douyin sharing via WeChat and QQ for violating the Antitrust Law). Looking at the world, it is clear that social applications such as TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram are blurring the line between social media and entertainment, leading to more consumer time competition.
So, will words really become a stumbling block in such a battle? According to some studies, the brain processes vision 60,000 times faster than text, visual aids can increase learning efficiency by up to 400%, and video is regarded as the most effective marketing tool.
When Mendelssohn made the "end of writing" talk, there was a moment of silence in the room-after all, writing is such an important creator of human civilization, and it seems that it should not be dismissed so easily. . Mendelssohn comforted everyone and said that it does not matter, the text will not disappear completely, "you have to write text for the video." "I have to." Our words are like the last triceratops, lingering on the warmer and warmer earth.
The "flattening" of the Internet: not the kind you want
Perhaps everyone has not realized that our fanatical demand for digital video (especially on-demand streaming) has quietly changed the Internet. According to Cisco’s forecast, by 2022, online video will account for more than 82% of all consumer Internet traffic, 15 times that of 2017. An important reason for this change is the rapid expansion of a special infrastructure in order to allow viewers to enjoy the video without interference.
It is the content delivery network (contentde-livery network, CDN), a private network owned by the world's largest technology company. Some companies specialize in its operations and operate side by side with the core traffic routing of the Internet. According to data from the research company TeleGeogra-phy, the changes in the network have been so obvious that almost half of all traffic flowing through the Internet today actually traverses these parallel paths.
Experts engaged in global network measurement have a description of what happened: This is called the flattening of the Internet. For the first time in decades, the way data is routed on the Internet has fundamentally changed: the Internet was originally recognized as a layered system composed of network providers, and about a dozen large-scale networks constitute the "backbone" of the Internet.
Today, the stratification of the Internet has disappeared; the new structure means that content owners like Google and Netflix have more power than ever to control the way their content reaches the final consumer. The restructuring of the Internet has led to intensified struggles between the largest companies on the Internet and traditional operators that own pipelines. In most developed Internet markets, a small number of large ISPs dominate, partly because they can peer with CDNs operated by video providers to ensure the fast video access their customers need.
And content companies will find that without their own privileged CDN, it will be difficult to compete with Internet giants. In the end, consumers have to give more choices to a few companies with Internet content and transmission methods.
This was not the case about a dozen years ago, because video buffering is annoying, and people don’t watch many online videos. This is due to the rapid development of the Internet, and data must traverse more and more networks to reach its destination. This means that certain types of content (such as video) require a continuous flow of data packets and cannot be streamed reliably over a certain distance. Instead of video content, such as text and pictures, the transmission effect is better. CDN changes all of this by shortening the distance a packet must travel to reach its destination.
With a CDN network, data rarely needs to reach the backbone network, but bypass it at the edge of the network. CDN solves the problem by distributing its content on a global scale instead of relying on a central server. You may ask, isn’t “flattening” a good word on the Internet? At least CDN provides us with free-flowing video streams.
But what is the price? One way of thinking is: if the "shared" Internet connected by a hierarchical structure disappears tomorrow, you can still get the services of a few giants, which is very useful for users who can pay for subscriptions and companies that can pay for CDN , But it is a disaster for other content on the Internet. In other words, the irony is that the "flat" Internet is also the Internet dominated by a few technology companies. At least in the United States, video is not currently streaming on the Internet, and CDN is a very expensive processing method that will leave many people alone.
China's current CDN coverage rate is not more than 20%, which is still far behind the 50% coverage rate in the mature North American market. It can be expected that, as the network becomes increasingly video-oriented, China's network structure will follow that of North America. According to Sullivan data forecasts, in the next five years, the average compound annual growth rate of China's CDN market is expected to maintain 30%.
The Internet becomes a read-only network again
Today's Internet is a thousand miles away from the myth of democracy and equality before it. A few technology companies dominate not only the infrastructure of the Internet, but also the most popular applications.
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, is launching a multi-year campaign to "redecentralize" the network so that a more balanced design can do what he believes. The power to curb monopoly, it is this power that led a company to dominate social networking, search, e-commerce, etc.
Although Berners-Lee's "decentralization" movement has won the support of ordinary Internet rights activists, it has not received the attention of the general public. It is difficult to gather people's rights in virtual space together, and the ownership dynamics of the infrastructure on which the Internet relies are often not easily noticed.
Ordinary users just think, it's great that I can watch football in real time. However, in the medium and long term, local content providers are bound to face serious risks of being crowded out, just as local news is disappearing in the dramatic changes in the media industry. Vertical integration has led to a series of global monopolies in the provision of Internet content and applications.
For video, the flat Internet also creates other nuances. With the increasing number of vertically integrated networks through which video streams pass, technologies that follow the principle of network decentralization have also been left behind. This is just a simple calculation of supply and demand-sending videos from Amazon or Netflix directly to consumer ISPs is definitely a better experience.
Take BitTorrent as an example. It used to be one of the main sources of Internet traffic in the world. As a computer network, it has a clever peer-to-peer system that allows users to share content (many of which are videos) that they own with others. This was once the future of Internet video. In 2008, BitTorrent accounted for one-third of the entire network traffic.
On today's flat Internet, the situation is very different. BitTorrent usage has dropped to only 1% of Internet traffic, far behind YouTube, Netflix, AmazonVideo and other companies, all of which are supported by giant companies with financial resources to invest in private CDN infrastructure.
The sharp drop in BitTorrent traffic symbolizes a greater change in Internet data flow. Many people used to think that data would flow online in a symmetrical manner: users would upload as much data as content producers, and downloaders and consumers themselves would become uploaders.
When Web 2.0 emerged that year, advocates claimed that all the examples pointed to one thing: end users write data to the network. Dennis Wilen called out the slogan "It's the uploads, stupid".
Even Berners-Lee said with excitement: “In 1989, one of the main purposes of the World Wide Web was to be used as a space for information sharing. It seems obvious that it should be a place where anyone can be creative and anyone can Contribution space. The first browser actually integrated browsing/editing, allowing people to edit any page and store this page on the Internet if they have access rights. The strange thing is that the Internet is more of a The publishing medium took off, and people engaged in offline editing... The World Wide Web was quickly filled with many interesting things, but there was no public space designed for authors to form a public discourse. Now, in 2005, we have blogs and wikis. They The popular facts made me feel that my idea that everyone needed a creative space was not crazy."
In fact, this is the first blog he wrote on December 12, 2005. I also wrote excitedly at that time: "The Internet is a kind of read-write network. We can read to write, and everything else is born from it." But now, Berners-Lee’s blog is on the Internet. No trace. And myself, I published the last blog on June 5, 2018.
People have put aside the concept of read-write network. The rise of video and dedicated CDN is just the newest and biggest stone for the burial of this concept.
Cisco’s Internet Forecast report said: “The emergence of users as content producers is an extremely important social, economic, and cultural phenomenon.” However, the report's writing changed: “But subscribers are still consuming more than they produce. Many videos."
Therefore, to what Zhang Xiaolong said in the public class, "The original intention of the video account is to make it easy for everyone to express publicly through video." Instead of only the performances of Internet celebrities and big Vs, I can only It can be seen as the ideal repercussions of the previous "classical Internet". In the era when giants dominate our online life, "no matter how small an individual has its own brand", it sounds pale and empty.
Welcome to the future of post text?
People are eager to get videos, and companies are happy to provide them in large quantities. New technologies such as augmented reality and virtual reality, as well as higher and higher video resolutions, mean that private CDNs will be used more than ever before. The epidemic quarantine has pushed up this trend. This is why the market research company BrandEssence predicts that the global CDN market valued at US$9.9 billion in 2018 will reach US$57.15 billion by 2025.
As big technology companies swallow more infrastructure and occupy more Internet traffic, the openness of the network has come to an end. The Internet is evolving from a peer-to-peer and open standard network to a proprietary collection composed of VPNs (Virtual Private Networks). Users have no idea about this: they think they are on the open Internet, when in fact that network is no longer there.
Currently, Internet users, infrastructure providers, and technology companies that increasingly vertically integrate content and distribution are all happy to see the smooth flow of video.
As I said in the previous comment, as the importance of the video increases, the importance of the text will continue to decline. The most influential communicators online have worked on web pages, blogs and public accounts. And they are now making podcasts, video blogs, short videos, live shows, promotional memes, marketing soft content, and so on. And all of this is related to the camera, the microphone, your ears and your eyes. As the headline of the Internet topic launched by The New York Times in February 2018: Welcome to the future of post-text.
The author Farhad Manjoo described the current state of the Internet in this way: It does not mean that the text will completely disappear from the eyes, because nothing on the Internet will really die. But in spite of this, we have only just begun to glimpse the deeper and more dynamic possibilities of an online culture in which text gradually recedes into the background and sounds and images become the universal language.
What will happen if words become a game for a few people again? A friend wrote in a message in my circle of friends: "I can only ask myself, fifty years from now, one hundred years from now, will people understand the essence of today's era by reading text or watching videos..."
In fact, I don’t want to say that you also know: Our world supports different content formats for different purposes. Videos are useful for certain tasks and attractive to certain people. Writing is suitable for other things and attractive to other types of people.
The wonderful video brings life to the story and makes people feel the pulse of life. Because it requires less cognitive burden, it constitutes a more popular method of information transmission. Video is powerful (and touching). Excellent writing mobilizes your longer attention span and deeper cognitive effort, helps you discern the world, and forces you to develop the habit of thinking. The text is powerful (and very interesting).
As a means of expression, one is not inherently superior to the other. Both have their advantages. Each has its own flaws.
Those who always say "a picture is worth a thousand words" have ever experienced the efficient expression of words? For example, Zhang Xiaolong watched an open class for several hours, but he could finish reading the lecture record for ten minutes, and he could easily and accurately find out the interesting and tasteless parts. Video has many benefits, but information density is usually not one of them. In fact, this is why I hate video because it is too time-consuming.
Mendelssohn’s statement about video goes against common sense: watching a video is not faster than scanning the text, nor does it contain more information. I can assert that the day when Face-book or WeChat drove everyone to publish videos, our information stream contained less valuable content than it is now.
Of course, you can also think that my needs are very different from those of most people. I read/check online things to get valuable content. Perhaps most people don't care much about it. They just want short-term entertainment, but at this point, video has actually defeated text decades ago. This situation does not matter.
However, please say one if it is one. Don't pretend to serve the world by creating a medium that can help everyone "digest more information." Stop selling false hopes that "everyone can express". Those are obviously gimmicks. When you just want to show your cute dog, video on the Internet may be useful, but what if we want to really discuss social issues?
So, writing must continue, not just "have to" write for the video.