The Medium is the #Shorts Message

The late great Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan famously said and wrote that “the medium is the message”. What is the message of this quotation? In McLuhan’s own words, that “a medium is not something neutral—it does something to people.”

Here is the master:

YouTube Shorts Messages

I use YouTube quite a bit. I like it as a medium to disseminate my underwater videography. I like to film the biodiversity and behavior of the small critters – fishes, sea slugs, crabs and others – living off Negros Island, where I presently live. Once in a while I film natural history on land, like spiders mating. I also like to film scenes I simply deem aesthetic, such as sunrises.  I think my videos are enjoyable, and hopefully educational for people all over the world to watch.

YouTube introduced the #shorts format, likely in an effort to compete with the social media platform TicToc. The shorts are upright in format, as filmed with a cellphone, and less than a minute in length. It’s very noticeable that YouTube shows shorts to viewers preferentially, they get a lot more views than my longer videos. So I am making more shorts. Their corporate strategy steers my creativity. That’s not necessarily bad, it’s a good nudge to think what the core of the message of my video is so that I can pack it into a single minute or less.

It seems that the attention span of the average media consumer is shrinking – are there actual data to confirm this? The #shorts format surely seems to confirm this notion. But is YouTube’s decision (and the popularity of Tic Toc) the cause of this trend, or are social media platforms going with the flow, and adapting their formats so that they are the most easily digestible for the average (or the least sharp?) consumer? Probably the social media platforms are both causes and followers here. There is likely no intention to educate and better the audience via medium-message, but an optimization of usership, which alters peoples’ viewing habits in return. Everyone just does his or her job. Massive changes in the psychological setup of the masses ensue. And I participate too, of course, I want folks to watch my YouTube channel, and I am not Konfuzius to teach the world (to pay attention for longer, in this case).

So, without further ado, my YouTube shorts. Enjoy, and try to pay attention for the duration of a few of these:

Mantis shrimp – a crustacean with intriguing behavior

Bigeye Mackerels – I love this one, even though it is one of the view shorts which didn’t get a lot of views.  

Funny!

A parasite on a fish eye. Unpleasant.