Facebook is seeming shifting its attention to video — first by allowing people and publishers alike to upload videos on the social network, and then by Facebook Live, with which people are able to broadcast themselves to their friends and followers. Recently, an executive with the company said that Facebook will be probably all video in five years. “The best way to tell stories in this world, where so much information is coming at us, actually is video,” Nicola Mendelsohn, who heads up Facebook’s operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa said. “It conveys so much more information in a much quicker period. So actually the trend helps us to digest much more information.” Tim Carmody, a reporter whose work has appeared on Wired, and The Verge among others, makes a strong case for texts, and why it is always going to be here. He writes: Text is surprisingly resilient. It’s cheap, it’s flexible, it’s discreet. Human brains process it absurdly well considering there’s nothing really built-in for it. Plenty of people can deal with text better than they can spoken language, whether as a matter of preference or necessity. And it’s endlessly computable — you can search it, code it. You can use text to make it do other things. In short, all of the same technological advances that enable more and more video, audio, and immersive VR entertainment also enable more and more text. We will see more of all of them as the technological bottlenecks open up. And text itself will get weirder, its properties less distinct, as it reflects new assumptions and possibilities borrowed from other tech and media. It already has! Text can be real-time, text can be ephemeral — text has taken on almost all of the attributes we always used to distinguish speech, but it’s still remained text. It’s still visual characters registered by the eye standing in for (and shaping its own) language.

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Source: Slashdot – Facebook Is Wrong, Text Is Deathless