Lights, camera, inaction

Behold! I have had a thought.

Hello!

Hi! I’m still in New York. It’s still very good. I am, for the most part, no longer jetlagged. I’m having a nice time! Even though I have begun hating the MTA with every fibre of my being. Why not - hear me out! - why not simply run a subway system that works? Where the trains arrive at regular intervals? Where the lines weren’t designed by someone who clearly loves a riddle? Just one woman’s opinion. Eric Adams, if you’re reading this: I could be your subway tsar.

Anyway! The Americans do occasionally come up with good things, like this long read on…I guess productivity? And what it’s meant to feel like, and why we chase it so much, and what it means to us and our sense of self. It’s a great essay, I hereby recommend it.

A column

I was trying to think of stories to write in New York the other day then realised that they all had something in common: they would probably go viral as videos. I’m not going to tell you what they are, because I may still end up writing them at some point, and because what they are doesn’t really matter.

What does is the format - the medium in which I’m used to convey information, and the fact that it seems to be on the way out. A few other people have had that realisation recently. One tweet that - perhaps ironically - stuck with me was from a New York Times reporter.

“in a world where TikTok & Reels has shown the revealed preference of many of our (younger) readers is to not be readers at all but viewers of our essays & articles read in 'Vox, Explained' voice, i wonder if the most telegenic or articulate among us will being doing more of these”, Talmon Smith said. 

“These”, in this context, actually referred to the video he was quote-tweeting, in which a beautiful, well put-together young woman engagingly talked about nuclear disarmament. She was charismatic and seemed very friendly; her tone was chatty but confident, and she relayed a lot of information in an easily comprehensible way, and in a short amount of time. Good for her! It’s just a shame that I cannot, and will not do any of these things.

As Smith pointed out, it does rather seem to be where the media industry is headed. People don’t really want to read anymore, but they really enjoy watching quick, snappy videos about anything and everything. They don’t want to pay for newspapers and Twitter is dying, so nothing meaningfully goes viral there, in the way it once did.

The shift, however, isn’t entirely confined to journalism. TikTok remains the most popular new app on the scene, and it is a video app. BeReal, the last app to become very popular then fade away nearly instantly, was all about pictures. BlueSky and Threads exist, but neither has quite captured people’s attention in the way that Twitter did before Musk ruined it. Instagram is, as ever, staying strong.

What this means in practice is that our era is over. Who are we? Easy: people who enjoy writing, be that posts or articles, serious or frivolous stuff, professionally, for fun or both. We’ve had a very solid run; I’ve been online and writing in one form or another for the past twenty years, nearly to the month.

I posted on MySpace and Blogspot, then on Twitter and wherever else allowed me to write about whatever was on my mind. I spent the rest of my time reading whatever was on other people’s minds - people like me, who preferred typing to talking, or filming themselves. Some of us were shy, others neurodivergent. English wasn’t everyone’s first language, and not everyone was comfortable with the way they looked. All of us were happy to have a way to communicate which allowed us to stop and think if we needed to.

What will happen to all of us when video takes over once and for all? I have no interest in filming myself talking. My ADHD is both crippling and unmedicated; I have never started a sentence and known where it was going to end. I hate making eye contact. I speak too fast. I don’t want to have to put make-up on whenever there is something I want to say, and I don’t want to appear on camera without make-up on. I’m too vain for that. 

Similarly, I want to be able to load a page on my phone and read a feature bit by bit, whenever I have a moment. I also want to be able to choose, sometimes, to immerse myself in a long read and spend fifteen, twenty minutes with it, with some music playing gently in the background. 

Crucially, I don’t care if the person who did the reporting is tall or short, ugly or pretty, having a good hair day or needing to use especially effective filters. I don’t want to know what they sound like, and where their accent comes from. That was the whole point of our internet! It was always quite meritocratic, in a way. It didn’t matter who you were, only what you wanted to share with the world.

Well, that’s one way to see it anyway. I suppose you could argue, in retrospect, that it was a supremacy like any other. Those who could write and were adept at painting a flattering picture of themselves online were the ones winning. If your wit and charm only really came across in person, the internet probably wasn’t really for you. I was one of the winners for a while, which may be why I didn’t even see it as a competition.

I only started realising that it wasn’t the natural order of things when videos started becoming more prevalent. Suddenly there were all these people out there, who had all these skills I could and would never master. Can’t they see how hard it is to stare into a camera without looking like a creep? Aren’t they aware of the confidence it takes to just talk and talk and talk for minutes on end? Do they really think anyone could just pick up a tripod and start filming?

Of course, that’s how I approached writing for a long time. It’d never really occurred to me that not everyone wanted to blog, or felt confident enough to do it. I and other writers like me had just been at the right place at the right time, to the extent that we never even realised how good we had it.

I think it’s one of the reasons why journalists became such an important part of Twitter. It’s such an obvious explanation that no one ever really talks about it. It feels stupid to even spell out, but here goes: journalists are people who write for a living. Twitter is and was a place where thoughts are expressed in writing. That’s it. It’s not that hacks are especially fascinating, or the media industry uniquely interesting to outsiders. We were just people who wrote, in a place where writing was what you did.

In a way, it is bleakly amusing that execs and editors tried to pivot to video all those years ago and ultimately failed. It’s now remembered as little more than a punchline, but they just got the dates wrong by about half a generation. People who grew up without the internet, either partially or entirely, never would have wanted to spend their lives watching endless clips.

The new kids on the block were raised watching YouTube, and so there is nothing more natural to them. They’re not going to get all existential about what the world would look like without all those websites publishing all sorts of articles, because a lot of them had died already by the time they became teenagers.

The internet isn’t wholly theirs yet, but it is going to be one day. We’re not fully obsolete yet, but soon we may well be. It’s quite a bittersweet epiphany, as we did really have a great time for a while, but all good things usually come to an end. We typed and typed and typed, to each other and to whoever wanted to read us, and it was very fun and life-changing. 

What feels especially frustrating is that video feels so transient and ephemeral. Unless you’re taking notes, the information remains with the person who posted it. You are only ever an audience, and only for a short time. Then again, we once thought that our words would last forever, but countless websites and platforms have spent the last few years deleting all their archives. Even online journalism, it turns out, can end up as tomorrow’s chip paper.

Still, I’d take that over trying to get the hang of my front-facing camera any day. Let the children film themselves if they wish to, and let those of us who can speak but not write have their time in the spotlight. We’ve hogged it for long enough, I guess.

A post

Bye!