In our long history, "reading" has undergone several revolutions, and paper books have become readily available. Increasingly accessible books don't make "reading" any easier.
Under the impact of television, the Internet, and social networks, how should we understand and treat reading?
Author | Lu Renjia
Edit | Cheng late
"How long have you not read?"
This is an anxious question. Reading on paper and writing has always seemed to be a serious ritual—although we can derive stories and experiences from listening to books and salons, reading is always imprinted in our perception in an inexplicable, precarious manner.
But the sudden rise of video reading is making that anxiety go away.
When we opened the video website search, there were many video works with various famous books and plot analysis, and they were still increasing.
In the comments section, "readers" are happy to share their reading experiences or story interpretations, while more "readers" — or viewers — are more than happy to punch in the cyber salon and let the video go into favorites to eat ashes. Obviously, for them, video reading is no different from reading on paper, and the text is read in its entirety the moment the video ends.
Why is video reading on the rise? What do these "new readers" "read" through video reading? In today's world where various forms of reading are constantly germinating and popular, and paper documents are becoming more and more weak, we have to ask: Will video reading replace text reading?
When we try to define "video reading"
Historically, reading has never been limited to books.
In the days when writing was written on parchment and papyrus, "books" were an extremely precious property; reading with books as a carrier was naturally tied to people with predominant power or property.
But reading was not thus monopolized—for ordinary small peasants and townspeople, plays, sermons, and even the legends of word of mouth in squares or taverns, texts obtained by the mouth of others, were nothing less than reading; for them, reading from the deductions and speeches of others was no different from reading through books.
When the reading process that such civilians were able to approach and carry out was over, they also believed that they had read the original book in its entirety.
In fact, "video reading" is not much different from drama and legend. As one of the various forms of reading, it speaks its own words through the player and display, relaying the text recorded on the paper to ordinary people who watch and listen to it.
Let's try to draw a relatively clear line for video reading: in a broad sense, all reading that receives native text content or adapts text content through the video audio and picture system can be regarded as a kind of video reading. Therefore, film and television works based on text adaptations may be the earliest video readings that can be traced back.
From enlightenment masterpieces such as Les Misérables to recent science fiction novels such as "The Lost South", film authors have selected the best books or the most compatible books from the vast sea of books and told them to the audience who entered the theater.
Not to mention the text-based adaptations in the film and television genre, the total length of the doubling allows the film and television drama to carry a larger volume of text content, such as "A Song of Ice and Fire: Game of Thrones" or "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" such as the huge production, directors prefer to present it to the audience in dozens of episodes of TV series.
The 2012 edition of Les Misérables adopts a retro song and dance film format, which makes the film mixed.
On the other hand, in the relatively ancient era of traditional mass media, video reading also appeared in the audience's field of vision as a famous interpretation of television columns. The "Hundred Tribunes" that exists in the memory of the post-90s generation has launched columns such as "Yizhong Tianpin Three Kingdoms" and "Bao Pengshan's New Water Margin" to interpret classical masterpieces.
The tomes did not dissuade the audience, and the professors' witty and original interpretations made these reading programs more suitable for all ages— to this day, on the Internet where cyber archaeology is prevalent, these old columns can still receive a lot of viewing and collection. In the era of streaming media, recommended book videos have become the latest form of video reading: video authors outline the text content in the shortest possible length, and readers also try to become interested in the text and understand the content in the shortest possible time.
From the interpretation of famous books to the recommendation of video books, video reading has a long history and has become the preferred reading form for a new generation of readers.
It can be seen that video reading does not appear and take shape overnight. Its emergence and growth are almost synchronized with the development of the mass media. From the screen to television, from film to electronic signals, video reading is getting newer and faster, facing different generations of readers — or viewers — as their century-long memories.
Why we chose video reading
The natural, strong appeal of the film and television medium inherited from images and colors is the primary reason why readers choose to read videos.
Visual research believes that we have entered the era of reading pictures, without any text content to understand all the graphic information projected on the retina, because graphics are the most intuitive images that objective things can project, from this point of view, words and speech, are based on this graphic projection after abstraction of the results.
Film and television language almost unreservedly inherits the direct, powerful attraction and impact of graphics, and at the moment when color images are almost completely popular, color is added to the factors that can express the emotional tone, making the fun and attractiveness of the "dynamic image" of the video almost reach its peak.
There is no doubt that figurative, vivid images are clearly more interesting than abstract, condensed words, especially for a generation that grew up under the influence of mass media, where pictures and videos are more intimate medium carriers than paper texts.
On the other hand, in the generation of industrialization and informatization, human beings are also pursuing faster and faster speed in reading.
In the era of radio and television "domination", reading will always be described by the older generation as a retro and tasteful activity, because it requires a lot of time and energy, and it is not as simple and easy to obtain as TV programs.
At a time when smart devices are becoming more and more popular and streaming media content continues to seize the media market, sitting in front of the TV and watching nearly 40 minutes of TV programs at regular intervals seems to have become holiday-limited entertainment for most students and working-class people, let alone let yourself sit quietly in front of the case, word by word and page by page to "nibble" away the books made of words and flesh.
Therefore, in video reading, those with brackets to strengthen the labeling, "one hour" and "five minutes" and other shorter and shorter browsing time prompts, as well as the long-press acceleration function that has gradually become the standard of video websites, very accurately poke the pain point of the acceleration era: hurry, hurry up.
After reading "Nineteen Eighty-Four" in three minutes, the quantum speed reading is no more than that.
It is precisely because of this that video reading can squeeze into the lace time of modern people, read for them, and tell them the secrets hidden in the text. More and more readers are choosing more interesting, more vivid and more "fast food" video reading, which has become a natural thing in this generation.
We "read" something in the video reading
The most attractive, of course, is the classical masterpiece and serious literature as a "tome". As the most orthodox member of the "book" in the public impression, the classic texts of ancient and modern China and the West have supported half of the video reading creation.
Search for "Interpretation of Famous Works" on Station B to find interpretation works that run through ancient and modern times and span east and west.
Among them, there are classic programs that inherit the characteristics of "storytelling" and present classic programs to the audience in the form of audiobooks. They do not have a gorgeous visual effect, often just a simple printed book cover and the most weighty book title to carry through the picture, the most suitable for opening at night reading time, listening to it without distraction.
Marx's original canon helps sleep, more or less hardcore.
There are also works that compare film and television classics with classical original works, through vivid and vivid film and television slices, solicit and quote classics, examine the background of creation, and dig deep into the content of the text.
UP master @ Muyu Shuixin in the interpretation of the Water Margin, the text is deciphered, stripped of the cocoon, quite a hermeneutic charm.
Perhaps because of the nature of the original text, the interpretation of "tomes" tends to be serious and calm, and these interpretations have become "tomes" compared to other types of videos: the authors do not hesitate to lengthen the length of the video and present the most complete content to the reader as much as possible. The same temperament is reflected in the reader. Readers who come to the "Holy Land Tour" often have a learning and sharing attitude, and there are few scenes of red ears due to disagreements.
Of course, in the comment area full of talents, it is indispensable for online literary heroes to promote words, rewrite history, and implement different world lines in parallel worlds, relieving the pressure brought by the serious atmosphere and filling the happy air inside and outside the video.
In addition to the serious tome, what firmly occupies the user's time is, of course, an entertaining text that focuses on leisure and makes the audience "figure a music".
In the case of the most famous "Cthulhu" system works, due to the difficult and cold style of LoveCraft's original work, it is quite exercise to read, and the secondary creations and derivative works within the same theme are leafy and complex, which is quite unfriendly to beginners.
As a result, rather than reading the original text, a large number of Cthulhu culture lovers choose to learn new knowledge through the mouths of community leaders and opinion leaders.
Million-level views are not uncommon in the Cthulhu community.
Correspondingly, a large number of video creation content has also been spawned by this trend, making Cthulhu culture the most popular among many niche cultures; among them, the sharing and interpretation of the video reading community is the greatest.
In addition to traditional texts, what is particularly interesting is that "set set parsing" based on film and television and games is becoming a type of video reading corpus, attracting more and more players and readers.
Let's turn our attention to the fire's AAA masterpiece, The Ring of Law.
As an orthodox soul work, the grand and complicated game script and storyline of "Eldon's Law Ring" are often not presented to the player in the form of straightforward game performances, and the production team often chooses to bury it in prop descriptions, NPC dialogue and character modeling, and map design. This makes it harder for ordinary viewers and non-hardcore players to fully understand the story in the course of dozens of hours.
The most-clicked plot analysis video is almost the same length as the interpretation of a serious literature.
What's more, the consistently high difficulty of soul games makes it difficult for players to balance between plot and gameplay. Therefore, in the video site without the moment of battle and high blood pressure, a large number of video viewers, gamers and cloud players sit around the campfire, listening to the video author who restores the plot from unpacking files, mined models and a large number of NPC dialogues to tell the original story, which has become the most special scene of "video reading".
Will video reading replace text reading?
For us, the answer is no.
The most important question before video reading is whether "what to read" is determined by the audience's own will, or is it profoundly influenced by the choice of "what to share" by the video author?
At the moment, this most important choice is clearly in favor of the video author, rather than the audience at the end of the information flow. For the text that translates into video content, the audience can certainly choose between "watching or not watching"; however, the decision of "making or not making" made by the video author based on personal preferences and reading experience influences the audience's choice from the source.
That is to say, the audience's choice is later than that of the video author; what they can read is largely dictated by the decisions of the reader at the next higher level, that is, the author of the video.
Therefore, the equal choice given to the audience by text reading is incomparable to video reading. For the reader, the vast number of texts that mankind has accumulated since the beginning of the AD has always been open to all, without the need for any intermediary, and they are always there when and wherever, whether the reader reads or not.
Admittedly, the reader's talent, financial status, and level of education all influence the reader's choice of text.
As Tichner's famous knowledge gap hypothesis conjecture conjectures, highly educated, economically superior, and gifted people are more likely to access deep and difficult information content, and implicit inequalities also exist in text reading—but the empowerment of all readers is equal.
The reader's choice of first-hand text can always be predetermined by the will of the self; all they need to overcome is the innate shortcomings or acquired deficiencies of the self, and they do not need to be swayed by the will of others.
Text reading cannot be replaced, and there is also the most valuable value of first-hand reading. On the one hand, due to the different carriers of film and television works and written texts, in the process of "book to electricity", in order to make the text content more in line with the expression of film and television language, structural adjustments and content adaptations have to be made.
For example, Les Misérables 2012 made extensive abridgements to ensure that the film does not exceed expectations, so we will not see the fight between Emperor Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington, nor can we observe bishop Bian Furu's upright, selfless and upright character from the details.
Les Misérables 2012 abandons the voluminous group portraits in the text, with Jean Valjean as the main line, as far as possible, the most important achievement of the Enlightenment era: humanism- in a limited film length.
Stills from Les Misérables.
Therefore, no matter how much the audience believes that "film and television are no different from the content of books", the deviations caused by different forms of media are always present, and there is no way to eliminate them except by reading them in person.
On the other hand, for the interpretation and recommendation columns, no matter how close the understanding of the program guests or the video authors is to the text authors, it cannot change the nature of the video works as the secondary creation output of text materials.
Thus, the corpus that the viewer receives from the reading of the video is cut, reconstructed, and interpreted by two creators, and in this context, no matter how hard the video author tries to restore the text, their will and thought inevitably join their own work.
This is the inherent flaw of video reading: under the playful form of reading, "pure" reading is inevitably sacrificed because of the inherent dual nature of video reading, and the reader can never approach the original text from the video corpus, let alone internalize it into one's own experience and perception.
Just as watching a movie is to experience "fifty-two times life", what we expect from reading is also a dreamlike experience that transcends what we can experience in our own lives, from the authors of the writing and the world they write about.
Words and paper are both barriers between us and them, as well as our mediums and theirs; only by turning over the lofty mountains formed by the ridges of books, entering the jungle of intertwined words, and chewing and experiencing with reading and thinking, will this joy of reading alone come.
Today's topic
What kind of "reading videos" do you like to watch?
· END ·
Author 丨 Lu Renjia
Editor 丨Cheng late
Proofreading 丨 Yang Chao
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