September 2005, A funny movie editor named Robert Ryang shot shining And edited a new trailer for it, making this axe-driven horror look like a sweetheart family movie. YouTube hasn’t released a beta yet, so Ryang posted his humor gem to a private area of his employer’s website and gave some friends a dotmov link. One of them posted a link to his blog and Ryang became an overnight sensation.
New York Times Noticing, watching in awe: “His secret website got 12,000 hits.” Ryang also achieved the highest human goal of the 20th century: He started getting calls from Hollywood. Hello, this is Hollywood.
I was a TV critic at the time, and when I first saw Liang’s masterpiece —buffer, buffer– I’m not sure if I’m qualified to review it. Is this digital item a show, a movie, an ad, or a web page? While I was thinking about this, I created a folder called “Internet TV”.
A few months later, YouTube is officially live. May I? The near-erotic fantasy of “fusion”—the moment when the Internet and TV finally merge into a kind of mundane singularity—has arrived. In June 2006, I wrote on my blog that people seemed to finally be “ready to accept video on their computers.” Four months later, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. The original World Wide Web, a static, low-bandwidth, hyperlinked language system, is over.
Since then, “Internet Television,” a phrase I’ve tried in vain to achieve, has pitched tents everywhere. Video defined what’s called Web 2.0, the only internet many of us know. It now accounts for around 82% of online traffic. Not only It’s just YouTube, Instagram, and Snap; even the verbal apps, where the stock is still text – from one-liners (Twitter) to marketing chatter (LinkedIn) – are full of videos.
But one app has never fully managed moving pictures: Facebook. The company, which acquired Instagram in 2012, the same year it went public, seems to believe its library of images and videos has been covered.
From the outset, Facebook has differentiated itself from MySpace and later Tumblr — emo, image-heavy sites that may lean toward porn — by catering to lower-bandwidth, more serious text consumers. Its users are greatly incentivized to keep things clean and reveal real names, real resumes, real birthplaces, real jobs.
Facebook’s fundamental commitment to text helped it expand its monster empire to the underserved population. (People without a big data plan still can’t see pictures on Facebook’s mobile app.) The app’s text interface also makes its representation a site for simple facts and granny-friendly content.
These strategies for world domination have devastating (even unintended) consequences: They leave hundreds of millions of people, eventually 2.9 billion, vulnerable to deception. When the platform was caught with a particularly serious disinformation campaign in 2015, those whose first and primary contact with the internet was Facebook weren’t ready. They are easily deceived. They start to accept what they see there – as experienced as the name and number in the employee roster, or college… facebook.
The same users also edit pranks on Facebook did Start pushing video with Facebook Watch and other streaming products and partners. (If I first saw the trailer for Ryang posted by Auntie on Facebook, I swear I’d probably be straight up because I keep misunderstanding shining, and burst into tears in “The Salisbury Hills.” )
