Could Videos Make Writing a Thing of the Past

More people are watching YouTube videos than ever before

Videos grab attention quickly and keep people engaged.

Almost everybody from Gen Z can record, edit, and publish to YouTube. Their channels are monetized and most of them like to learn by watching a video instead of finding some book or an article.

Why are they choosing videos over written text? Around 90% of information reaching your brain is visual. You can process visual information 60,000 times faster than text. The written word evolved much later than the spoken word. We can learn and remember more if we watch a video.

Recently, Evan Williams began a question form where Medium users can ask questions. One guy, Kevin, asked him this question:

“The Future of Blogging in a Multimedia World. Gen Z is increasingly consuming more videos. How does Medium stay relevant?”

Evan Williams chose to answer this question in two parts:

Part 1: Reading and writing are going to be around for a long time.

He says writing is older than videos. When writing was invented, it was an incredible technology. Since its invention, it has been becoming more and more popular. Its value is not going down — it’s going up.

When somebody wants to write, it is easy to write. People can record what is on their mind or what they are feeling. Anybody can read without a device. Writing is efficient to consume and lightweight to create.

Evan William calls a book an incredible device that stores and disseminates ideas and information. He says it has the highest accessibility to information ratio. You can learn what you want to learn at your own pace.

Do people — not just Gen Z — watch more videos today?

People are consuming more videos today, but they are reading more text as well. Reading brings slower but deep gratification. If you sleep for eight hours, books are better for learning new information.

All the search engines, newspapers, blogs, lectures, pdfs, and books use text. Every searches a new word on google and then clicks on the democratically promoted articles. People read more these days — if you add the number of printed books, digital books, blogs, messages, posts, and audiobooks:

Gen Z succeeds Millennials and precedes Generation Alpha. People born in the late 1990s to early 2010s are included in Gen Z.

Gen Z plays more games and watches more videos. Evan Wiliams says he played more games and watched more videos as a teenager than he read books. But as he aged, his focus shifted to written words.

He said YouTube is a phenomenon. People watch videos all the time, but most of the videos include written text. Lectures, slides, translated content, tutorials, and silent videos overlaid with text, are a huge part of video consumption.

He said podcasts and audiobooks are becoming popular as well. These fill the time when someone’s hands or eyes are not free. People listen to audiobooks and podcasts during the walk or jog and daily commute to the office.

All this means the written word is moving the videos, audiobooks, and podcasts from behind the scenes. There is no chance people will quit reading any time soon.

Part 2: There’s no reason for Medium to be limited to reading and writing.

According to Evan Williams, Medium will always remain relevant. Youtube provides written transcripts for most of its videos. Similarly, writers can provide an audio or a video for their written words. Medium is working on making audio of popular articles already.

me·di·um: a means by which something is communicated or expressed

At Medium, the goal is to create a deeper understanding of issues and spread ideas that matter. Like TED, some ideas are worth spreading. On an increasingly noisy internet, one voice is not enough. As more writers write about an idea — whose time has come — it creates a social impact.

Medium is trying to build tools — the infrastructure and network — for spreading ideas and deep insights. The writers — the people with deep insights — may choose to use videos to broadcast their words in the future. In contrast to YouTube, Medium will remain a place where people discuss important issues and personal experiences.

Medium’s focus has been the written expression of thoughts and ideas in the past, but it doesn’t have to be limited to only text. Evan Williams said, “… we’ve also dabbled in audio, tappable stories (words and pictures), video, and even events.”

He believes the internet allows all forms of expression — audio, video, written words, and audiobooks — ‘to co-exist and coalesce.’ For Evan Williams, the most important thing is that quality thinking and great ideas can move from one brain to another that may be able to make better use of those thoughts and ideas.

He said he’ll keep on spreading the thoughts that may change the world someday.

Final Thoughts

Book reading and reading for pleasure is going down. Reading trends are going down since the 1980’s — long before YouTube and Facebook grabbed people’s attention.

In the US, reading for pleasure has fallen by 30 percent since 2004, as estimated by the American Time Use Survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

According to a report, ‘To Read or Not To Read,’ reading is becoming less popular. The share of grown-ups reading a novel, short story, poem or play fell from 57% in 1982 to 43% in 2015.

In the Netherlands, one study about reading trends concluded that from 1955 to 1995, time spent watching TV grew while reading time declined: “Competition from television turned out to be the most evident cause of the decline in reading.”

In the end, I would like to share two stories:

1. When J.K. Rowling’s series of novels was released, during the 1990s, children started reading more. In the age of TV, long queues outside the bookshops were a new thing.
2. In 2011, Fifty Shades of Grey, written by E. L. James, hit the shops. Everybody wanted to read erotic details of the affair between Anastasia Steele — a college student — and Christian Grey — a young billionaire.

We live in a competitive world. When the written words make more sense than the TV and movies, people read. In another article, Evan Williams said he wanted Medium writers to produce quality content as good as the Game of Thrones.

You can read my curated stories here.