The post-text future is here

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technology

You read that right. It’s time to make way for sounds and pictures, says Farhad Manjoo

I’ll make this short: reading prose on a screen is going out of fashion. We’re taking stock of the Internet right now, with writers who cover the digital world cataloguing some of the most consequential currents shaping it, and one truth becomes clear. The defining narrative of our online moment concerns the decline of text, and the exploding reach and power of audio and video.

This multimedia Internet has been gaining on the text-based Internet for years. But last year, the story accelerated sharply, and now audio and video are unstoppable. The most influential communicators online once worked on webpages and blogs. They’re now making podcasts, Netflix shows, propaganda memes, Instagram and YouTube channels, and apps like HQ Trivia.

Consider the most compelling digital innovations now emerging: the talking assistants, Apple’s face-reading phone, artificial intelligence to search photos or translate spoken language, and augmented reality – which inserts any digital image into a live view of your surroundings. Together, they’re all sending us the same message: Welcome to the post-text future.

The Internet was born in text because text was once the only format computers understood. Then we started giving machines eyes and ears – that is, smartphones were invented – and now we’ve provided them brains to decipher and manipulate multimedia. Suddenly the script flipped: now it’s often easier to communicate with machines through images and sounds than text.

It’s more than just talking to digital assistants. Artificial intelligence might soon let us search and index much of the world’s repository of audio and video, giving sounds and pictures a power that has kept text dominant online for so long.

Tech didn’t just make multimedia easier to produce. It also democratised non-text formats, which for so long had been accessible only to studios. Podcasting became the new blogging, a way for committed amateurs and obsessives to plumb the underexplored eddies and mysteries of life.

Meanwhile, social media showered every multimedia creator with a potential audience, and allowed the audience to connect and discuss the work, deepening fans’ relationship to obsession.

It’s a kind of passion that ultimately makes for a fundamentally new, deeper kind of art. Look at all the room the Internet opened up for crazy mash-ups of ideas. Netflix’s best recent show, American Vandal, is a parody of Serial, the true-crime podcast, and Making a Murderer, another Netflix show.

The haze of misinformation hanging over online life will only darken under multimedia – think of your phone as a Hollywood-grade visual-effects studio that could be used to make anyone appear to say or do anything. The ability to search audio and video as easily text means, effectively, the end of any private space.

Then there’s the more basic question of how pictures and sounds alter how we think. An information system dominated by pictures and sounds prizes emotion over rationality. It’s a world where slogans and memes have more sticking power than arguments. (Remind you of anyone?) And will someone please think of the children: do you know how much power YouTube has over your kids? Are you afraid to find out?

But what are we going to do? There seems no going back now. For text, the writing is on the wall.

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