The dynamics in and around Facebook are changing (again) and this time the wind is sailing its boat towards videos, and loads and loads of them. From news to blog posts, from reviews to casual events, people are increasingly sharing videos and boy, they just keep coming like a gigantic wave. While the upside is that surfing through the video content is easier than reading several paragraphs of someone’s status or an article, it’s also outright annoying!
Before we get into explaining why videos are no good, we need to understand why this change is happening. And there is no dearth of reasons for the same. For starters, Facebook is celebrating its 13th birthday– Friends Day, with a friend’s day video that shows a ‘Facebook photo monster’ dancing. If that wasn’t cheesy enough, the ‘photo monster’ over the period of its dance sequence shows you snippets of your time on Facebook. The only relief is that it doesn’t dig deep in your timeline to bring into the forefront the embarrassing moments and pics that you’ve probably forgotten about by now. And that’s just the beginning of the ‘video wave’ that is lashing our walls.
Another reason (apart from the websites going all ‘video savvy’) for this torrent is that lately, Facebook has started promoting live videos on its platform. While the reason for this sudden surge seems fairly noble on part of Facebook, which is just trying to increase user engagement by finding new and innovative ways to keep people hooked to its platform, it’s also creating an unnecessary clutter by bombarding our homepages and wall with videos (and videos only).
Facebook introduced live video for all verified accounts back in 2015. Months later, it opened the option for all its users around the globe. However, it’s only now that sharing live videos has caught up the trend. The ease with which Facebook lets users video of their life events is lucrative and noble, given that shooting videos was considered the job of photographers. But let’s not go all gaga about it coz it may sound as if you’re being given more freedom but it’s also a honey trap.
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Remember that time of the month when your service provider drops you a warning text about the amount of data that you’ve consumed and you end up being in a state of shock wondering where did it all go? Well, you can conveniently blame Facebook for it. The exponential increase in the number of videos that are going up on Facebook (granted they’re interesting and you cannot take your eyes off them) combined with the unlimited availability of the ‘data eating monsters’ i.e. videos, the mobile data that we consume every month is increasing and so are our bills.
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Let’s be honest about it, while videos are interesting, reading a well-written article can never go out of vogue. It’s like reading the hardbound version of a timeless classic book vs reading the same on kindle. The joy of holding a book in hand (in this case, reading an article online the good old fashioned way) is peerless. The added benefit of reading something worthwhile is that you end up using your brain and learning more than you’d normally want to. Safe to say that these videos are not just adding chaos to our Facebook walls but also contributing in dumbing down our brains.
Dear Facebook, while we appreciate all the hard work that you put in introducing new features, please don’t over do it coz you might end up losing us for good!
