Video Singles

 

Tech expert Scott Galloway was interviewed on DW News a few days ago and he said something interesting which made me think about the "Video 45" idea:

"The CCP is likely using TikTok for its own objectives right now and we don't even know it because if we were to take this interview and splice it up into TikTok-size videos there'd be some content that reflects well on the west and some content that highlights the problems and the shortcomings of the West so wouldn't the CCP and TikTok be dumb not to put their thumb on the scale of content that makes the West look bad?"

Back in the aughts, I was thinking that if you liked a movie you wouldn't necessarily have to buy the whole movie--you could just buy the "single" of scenes that you liked and it would remind you of the movie-(a synecdoche essentially) where the part stands for the whole. But what Galloway was saying is that China cherry-picks the short-form content that supports their political positions. This is the polar opposite of the part stands for the whole and is bleached of context. Whenever you isolate one element, it's going to be connected to the rest of it or it isn't. In music, a Single is a part of the whole--the whole Album. Within the song itself, there are also the various sections, the verse, chorus, and bridge, and you could have the "45s" of those as well as isolated stems, as well as micro-stems only a few seconds long, and there is integrity with the whole. Ever since the advent of recording, people were able to identify a song just by hearing a few seconds--and that's a synecdoche as well. But if you take a 19-second video and take it out of context with a lot of other things, then the part doesn't stand for the whole--case on-point the 19-second video that went viral, and was bleached of context. 

Technically, it's low context in terms of Edward Hall's theory of low context and high context. Almost all societies now are low-context where there's nothing implicit--everything has to be spelled out--so you can remove one part of it and some people think that it represents the whole and it doesn't represent the whole. It's very dangerous to manipulate the sequence of ideas that way but that's what's happening now with social media. It is exformation in some ways, which is information that has been distilled down to its essence, so you don't have to say everything--you can just say a few words and everybody knows what you're talking about. But in this case with the Zelensky clip, it's not the complete story, or people don't take the time to consider the inferences.

In some ways, I think it's interesting from an artistic standpoint, but art seems to be going out the window with short-form content. Filmmakers must be frustrated that younger people are putting all their attention on TikTok. Galloway was saying that it's more popular with 15 to 30-year-olds than film or music--or rather people are binge-watching short-form as the new long-form.