Last week I took a look at Ophelia Chong’s work and how she is combining elements from a traditional art medium with digital distribution to produce a unique take on artistic expression. This week, I wanted to shift gears a little.

I received a video ad in the mail from my friend Nick Schmidt. It was an entry to a contest put on by SOBcon and Utterz to create the best video advertisement. I really liked what he did with the medium and after watching it, it got me thinking about Social Media’s growing obsession with video.

Moving Pictures

The web has fundamentally altered the way that we interact with video. Before mobile broadband, cheap digital camcorders and easy to use video editing software, creating a film for distribution online was an ordeal. Now, thanks to companies like Qik, Utterz, and Seesmic video is moving from film school into territory traditionally reserved for text. Instead of being used primarily for exposition, canned video is now being used for conversation.

Seesmic, a twitter-like service for short video, is taking this idea to its next logical step by releasing a video plugin for blog comments to leave short clips of themselves responding to post.

On the plus side, there is something to be said about being able to see those who we interact with online. By pulling back the veil, you add an element of trust and more than that, you add an element of accountability to online conversations. It’s hard to get into a flame war when your opponent can see into your living room.

The downside to all of this is in the technology itself. Video is not a medium designed for easy scanning. In order to understand what’s happening, you have to watch a video the entire way through. Watching even a 30 second clip takes time (roughly 30 seconds), and time is not a commodity that web users have a great deal of.

The genius of text is that you can summarize, scan and internalize huge amounts of information while filtering out the irrelevant material. Video is much more rigid.

The point is that the only way that the extra time becomes justified is if the video provides more “value” to the end user, and it is still an open question whether you get anything more out of seeing your favorite web personality chatting about the same things they could put into words.

Taking another look at the Nick’s video, I think there is something to be said about video in the context of personal branding. One block of text can be extremely difficult to differentiate from another block of text, and worse than that text provides very few clues as to the emotional context of the person writing. In advertising of any kind, emotion is critical to conveying message. In these situations, we see that the point of video is not to deliver information but to convey personality.

The jury is still out on whether video is really a necessary next step in media distribution. In most cases, I doubt it. A good rule of thumb I use for video is the same as my rule for judging any rich media. If you can create a text transcript and lose nothing in the translation, then what’s the point?

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