How many people watch the Science Fiction youtube channel?
One effect of YouTube is that video is now as permanent as text
One of the reasons I put time and effort into YouTube is because of our return to a culture of “orality”
For most of human history we couldn’t store knowledge, except by oral transmission. Telling and memorising stories was a big deal! Ancient storytellers spent their entire lives memorising epics like the Ramayana. Every telling was unique.
Then we invented writing. And for the last 5000 years or so, written texts have been the standard way of transmitting knowledge. That accelerated with the printing press. At the peak of the print media in the late early 2000s, a single issue of the New York Times published more new words than had been printed in the entire history of humankind before 1900!
Then came the internet.
And then online video and YouTube.
One effect of YouTube is that video is now as permanent as text. And it has a major advantage, the audience who are “literate” at interpreting video texts is fifty to a hundred times greater than print texts.
A practical example: my small Science Fiction youtube channel reached 280,000 unique viewers in the last 365 days.Had I published the essays on the channel as a book, even if it became a bestseller (unlikely) it would reach far fewer people.
Because humans love to listen and watch other humans speak. We’re naturally wired for oral storytelling in a way very few of us are for reading print. And the video essay is an entirely new media, that combines textual and visual storytelling techniques to convey complex but clear messages to a very wide audience.
As I’ve built my skills as a video essayist, I began to wonder if this same combination of spoken word and video imagery could tell fiction stories. The Ocean of Story is a first effort to answer that question.
