The Politics of Internet Audiovisualization

There seems no denying that the web has become much less text-based and much more audiovisually-based where the "content" published and consumed are concerned. This does not seem to me to be a neutral development, certainly where the ability of a few to control what we see online, and thereby influence the discourse broadly, is concerned. Quite the contrary, it makes a technology that it has made a technology that was always more centralized, elitist, even authoritarian from the start than cyber-utopian propagandists ever let on more so, with two factors especially relevant.

One is that the old text-based Internet permitted greater accessibility, and deeper, more critically-minded interaction, in various ways. Certainly it seems to me that, where the resources required are concerned, far more people are able to produce a passable 1,000-word post and put it up on a page than produce a passable video conveying the same content (or any content). It was also the case that the experience of reading text was more conducive to attentiveness toward and parsing of the content than the experience of listening to someone speak in a video intrinsically less susceptible to preview, to "close reading," etc.. By the same token the audience were more inclined to reply, and reply thoughtfully, with a worked-out written response expressing their thinking. The result is that if, as Jen Schradie had it, the Internet was always a better tool of broadcast than of dialogue there was still more room for the latter than there would later be when the written word had to compete so much with the moving image, the audiovisual orientation raising the costs of participation in a way shutting out many, and reducing the scope for interactivity as Internet usage becomes still more a broadcasting medium.

At the same time there is the reality that if there are many forms of rhetorical appeal those who have sought to appeal to an audience's reason have found themselves more reliant on the word than the image--whereas those who have deliberately looked to bypass or overwhelm the rational faculties have historically found in the image the better tool. After all, if a picture may be worth a thousand words in cases, in many a case a thousand words can tell a person a great many things that no plausible number of images can convey--images most effective when the purpose is conveying a simple, already known and understood message forcefully, rather than introducing us to a new message, and still less, helping us make sense of the complex phenomena around us. Accordingly a technological context in which the image is so much in the ascendant over the word would seem to reshape Internet culture in favor of those who place their trust in bypassing rational thinking with images in favor of the elitist and authoritarian as against the egalitarian and democratic, with all that implies for the discourse at large.