I grew up in an era of print.  We are now living in an era increasingly of video.  What are the implications for public speakers and communications in general?  Following are a series of axioms that I hope will provoke you to respond with insights of your own, in the (written) comments below.

Print is fast. Video is slow but speeding up.  One of my pet peeves with video is how inefficient and slow it is for conveying information.  The cliché says that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’, but my experience is exactly the opposite.  I find it painfully difficult to watch documentaries because it takes so long for the medium to impart the same amount of information I could devour in a brief article in a few minutes.  But there is no question that video is speeding up.  We are developing a video vernacular that moves much faster and more economically in 2022 than it did in, say, 1995.  Movies from the 90s seem to crawl at a pace that makes them nearly unwatchable compared to today’s films – unless of course we are talking about emotional impact or visual beauty, and then time is not important, is it?

A recent study found that students could absorb as much information watching a video of a lecture at twice the speed (roughly 300 words per minute) of normal speech.  It’s a surprising finding because the limit was thought to be 275 words per minute, based on earlier studies.  But the research suggests that we have still faster video to come.  (And of course there is a difference between the video vernacular at its most economical and effective versus merely filming a lecture.) Given that our information flow continues to increase in speed and volume, we’re going to need to be able to absorb still faster film speeds as video replaces print.

If it isn’t videoed, it hasn’t happened.  Thanks to mobile phones, the amount of video of everything from baby’s first steps to successful climbs of Mount Everest is ballooning at a staggering clip.  I have maybe a handful of pictures remaining from my childhood, and the earliest is probably one of me holding a toy train, a big grin on my face, at roughly age 2 — a moment for which I have no independent memory.  My granddaughter’s image, at one year, is already recorded on daily pictures and videos that go way beyond anything possible or even imagined then.  What will be the implications of this massive documentary deposit?  Will she be more self-aware?  How will it affect her memory of her childhood?  Most youthful memories hitherto have begun with language acquisition – what will these early externally-recorded ‘memories’ do to her sense of her growing self?

Books are fast becoming souvenirs.  As anyone who has signed books after a speech knows, the virtue in the book lies largely in its connection to the event and the temporary celebrity status earned by the author thanks to the bright lights, the stage, and the applause.  Today, I’m delighted when someone tells me they have discovered one of my books through a recommendation or social media or the like.  I’m giddy bordering on astonishment when a comment reveals that they have actually read the book.  I am truly not cynical – just keenly aware that with more than a cool million new books published in the U. S. alone every year, and tens of millions of already-published books still in print, for someone to find yours is a heroic feat akin to Hercules finding a button underneath all that dirt in the Augean stables during his efforts there. Then, reading a book is a 6 – 12-hour relationship with the author.  Who has time for that when a bulleted 5-minute summary is easily found on Facebook or some other platform?

I’m not sentimental. Indeed, I’m a technophile always looking ahead to new technology that can make our lives better, easier, simpler, cheaper or environmentally sounder.  But what will we gain, and what will we lose, when video completely replaces the book as the way we humans communicate with one another through generations, space, and time?

Applied Cognitive Psychology (Murphy et al., 2022).