Your silent Facebook feed: this week Paul Ford and Rich Ziade talk about how video has taken over Facebook — and about how, according to Digiday, 85% of those videos are viewed silently. They debate form and content, consider user experience, and fixate on a fictional video in which an man drives a Vespa into a hole. They also discuss Rich’s mother’s cooking.
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Paul: All of that stuff [i.e. Facebook video] is representative of our culture as it is now. Now granted, right now it looks like an enormous flaming armpit of culture. Just a nightmare hell pit, right? But what I’m thinking is like, five years from now, ten years from now, that’s who we were. We’re gonna want to know.
Rich (on Buzzfeed’s Tasty videos): They’re like, “Oh! Potato poppers.” And what they do is they, they sort of take this top-down camera and they cook up something, usually it’s gross, usually it’s like, I’m gonna melt cheese inside bacon that’s inside of a potato, or something like that. But what they do is they edit it up, and they play it at a fast speed, and I’m never gonna cook any one of these things, right? But for 30 seconds, watching this thing get prepared at high speed, it is the equivalent of just a sort of a quick whiff of cocaine.
Rich: I wonder if, like, it’s going to be too burdensome to look at a photo. And it’ll just be a shape.
Paul: Just a triangle.
Rich: Yeah. Like a triangle, flat, like whizzes by, and then a square whizzes by. Like, where does it get reduced down to?
Paul: I think it gets reduced down to, kind of this mirror principle. People like to look at themselves, or look at…fantasy versions of life, right?
Rich: Mmmm.
Paul: So I think that, a half-naked attractive woman is more fundamental than a triangle, which is actually an abstract shape.
Rich: Yeah.
Paul: That requires a sort of Platonic sensibility to understand?
Rich: True.
Paul: Whereas really, the simplest thing is like, like those ones where there’s a woman, like, you see her from the back, and her hand is reaching back. There’s like this meme where, it’s like follow me there, or something. And it’s just a lot of butts and bare backs —
Rich: Mmmm. OK.
Paul: And they’re all in beautiful Venice —
Rich: So the evolution of media in your mind is towards butts and bare backs. Cool. Let’s close on that note. I think that’s an interesting takeaway.
Paul: I mean, honestly, I’m trying to, trying to bring it up a notch. But nah, that’s about right.
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Track Changes is the weekly technology and culture podcast from Postlight, hosted by Paul Ford and Rich Ziade. Coordination, research, and management by Elizabeth Minkel, who also prepared the summary of this episode. Production and editing by Tom Meyers. Podcast logo and design by Matt Quintanilla of Postlight. We record with Paul Ruest and Noriko Okabe at Argot Studios. Listen to more episodes here.