Short Videos as Digital Folklore

The rise of short videos has fueled a surge in creativity, but it’s dealt a blow to literacy in society

Video explosion. In North America today, short videos account for nearly 80% of all mobile traffic. Image Credit: David Espejo/Getty Images

Short videos—from TikToks to Instagram reels to YouTube clips—have become a new digital obsession. Statistics show that short videos account for nearly 80% of all mobile traffic in North America. Even on originally conversational platforms, like Facebook, video viewing has come to account for more than half of user time, turning it into an increasingly video-based platform.

Demographics matter, of course. Older generations treat reels as residues of TV in the digital era—they’re largely consumers, mostly watching videos and rarely posting their own. But among youth, shooting their own reels and video stories has become very common. It’s not without reason that Gen Zers are called the TikTok generation. The format lets them become TV producers in their own right, pursuing “15 minutes of fame” with incredible ease of production and potential access to millions of viewers. Reels don’t offer the proverbial full 15 minutes—only one to two—but the affordance of countless attempts and the chance of virality keep the reeling machine rolling at increasing speed and volume.

Media is the hardware of society, and culture is its software. Short videos signify more than just a shift in media habits. Due to the addictive ease of posting, viewing and sharing, short videos have become a new global form of media engagement, finishing off the remnants of culture shaped by literacy, print and broadcasting media. Short videos unleash the creative energy of the masses—but they also readjust cognitive and social settings to suit the conditions of postliteracy. Short videos switch the detached and rational perception typical of literacy to the impulsive immersion typical of orality. Unnoticeable but massive, this shift reverses mass communication further from literate forms—toward folklore.

A New Environmental Force

People in the media might recall how a “pivot to video” was expected to save the news industry in the mid-2010s. The pivot did happen—but not in journalism. The rising trend was misattributed: It wasn’t journalists but social media users who pivoted to producing, sharing and consuming video.

YouTube has provided this opportunity since 2005; Instagram and other platforms followed. YouTube, however, emerged in the pre-smartphone era and inherited the legacy of the video camera, when making video required significant skill and effort. The advent of smartphones changed this; they democratized video production and sharing. Along the way, the “optimal” video length for social media—both for production and consumption—was found to be about one minute. Soon after this mobile-driven short video format proved popular, a platform built around it burst onto the scene. The real explosion of short videos began with the rise of TikTok in 2016.

Since then, TikTok has shown the fastest growth, bypassing many older and larger platforms, especially among younger users. Globally, Facebook still retains the lead in monthly users (3.1 billion), with TikTok in fifth place (1.7 billion). However, TikTok has already surpassed Facebook in average time spent per user—about 60 minutes on TikTok versus under 40 on Facebook.

Digital Media: The Emancipation of the Spectacle

“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation,” wrote Guy Debord in his 1967 book “The Society of the Spectacle.” The book came from a time in which television was reshaping society. Life was increasingly becoming mediated by mass media imagery. Debord stated that capitalism reduced human life to possession and then, armed with mass media, transformed possession into mere appearance: being—having—appearing. He argued that “the spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images.”

The idea of an induced, consumerism-driven reality was common in postmodernist philosophy, which emerged in the television era. “For a long time, capital had only to produce goods; consumption ran by itself,” wrote French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. “Today it is necessary to produce consumers, to produce demand, and this production is infinitely more costly than that of goods.” According to him, marketing became more crucial than production, leading to the “ideological genesis of needs,” mirroring Debord’s concept of “pseudo-needs.” The picture of the world shaped by induced needs absorbed reality itself. This picture was a copy without an original—simulacra shaping hyperreality, as Baudrillard called it, echoing Debord’s metaphor of the spectacle.

These complex philosophical constructs are familiar to each of us through consumerist habits. Since the television era, we’ve increasingly bought things not for their practical use but for their socially induced value, reflecting the shift from “natural” to “pseudo-needs.” An old car, old clothes or an old device may still function, but many people buy new ones precisely because the symbolic value of things, induced by the society of the spectacle, has taken the lead. “Using” evolved into “appearing,” so that society kept funding capitalist production—now the production of the spectacle.

The only way to make people buy things they may not actually need is to induce an emotional connection with the symbolic value of those things. This is where the imagery of mass culture—especially television—proved highly effective. It triggered emotional attachment and served to attract, synchronize and package viewers into saleable audiences. These were the ideal political-economic conditions in which the society of the spectacle could emerge.

Media conditions made the spectacle of the TV era centralized and broadcast. The spectacle featured professional performers—journalists, public figures, TV hosts, celebrities, academics. But now digital media have flipped the spectacle. As economist Arnold Kling noted, “On the phone, our friends act like celebrities and celebrities act like our friends.” Digital media allowed ordinary users to feature themselves. No longer was the spectacle broadcast—it became crowdsourced. Everyone could become a content creator, a self-brander: Former spectators were offered the chance to become spectacular themselves, while also liking and sharing the performances of others.

The Folklore of Digital Society

The affordability of short video sharing reversed the industrial, elite-driven production of the spectacle into Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin’s medieval carnival, the village-fair balagan show, commedia dell’arte and the traveling circus—with their people-powered humor, folk bawdry and bizarre menagerie. Just as podcasters have become bards of the digital era, short videos have retrieved folklore in a new, digital form.

Reels did not just emancipate authorship—the carnivalesque of reels intercepted the role-modeling power of TV and freed it from elite control. Debord’s electronic spectacle flipped into a populist digital spectacle with an astonishing variety of genres. Some genres mimic TV formats, but many have emerged specifically for this medium. “TikTok dance” became eponymic for describing short videos, though video dancing remains popular mostly within narrow demographics. The genre variety of reels still seems to be in an early phase, yet it already entertains all kinds of people in all kinds of moods: sports and movie clips, life hacks and DIY tricks, comedy sketches and couples’ skits, cooking and recipes, fitness routines and beauty tutorials, unboxing and product reviews, motivational tips and their mockery, cute or deadly animals, parenting and family chaos, dating humor, travel snippets, fact explainers and “satisfying” visuals of tidying up or completing something—you name it.

Eroticism and profanity, cuteness and disgust, humanness and brutality, carnivalesque humor, satire and mockery drive these genres in the directions the public favors most. In the TV spectacle, elites knew better what to show, while measuring audience reactions for better targeting required serious effort. In the digital spectacle of reels—just like in the balagan theater at the village fair—the crowd is part of the immersive show. Users not only like and share what resonates most but can also jump on stage themselves and reproduce those genres and approaches they believe will provoke a response from the crowd.

Short videos display not just popular folk scenes but folks themselves. The most tempting part is that in the digital environment, users can replay themselves in a desired way. And so they do—in the digital spectacle, former spectators seek to make their digital selves spectacular. Acknowledgement—via likes, comments and other forms of engagement—serves as proof of worth. Digital media have reversed the society of the spectacle into a society of ostentation, where not only elite actors but everyone bombards everyone with their desired selves, presented in various forms—from silly GIFs and food photos to sophisticated Substacks and short videos. The question is: Why is the popularity of short videos growing faster than anything else?

Digital Orality of Short Videos

As a state of mind and society, orality differs from literacy not simply because one is spoken and the other is written. More importantly, literacy detaches humans from their environment, while orality keeps them immersed in it. Digital media recreate the conditions of full immersion, with their impulsive, oral-like reactions to the environment—that’s why it’s digital orality.

The cognitive and cultural effect of short videos can be compared to that of radio. In the first half of the 20th century, radio was the first truly mass medium—and the first that did not require literacy (in a society that was already largely literate). Radio began “deliterating” its audience, opening the era of post-literacy. First, it did not require reading at all. Second, it synchronized the worldview of the masses by delivering them all one “signal” simultaneously—it’s not without a reason that Marshall McLuhan called radio “the tribal drum.”

Nevertheless, radio was a technological product of literacy and relied on literate practices and institutions. Though performed orally, radio required scripts and budgets, institutional and educational efforts—all of which were products of literacy. The oral speech of radio hosts was literate speech, representing what Walter Ong called “secondary orality”—the electronic orality of cultures based on writing.

Short video is also based on technological progress enabled by literacy but requires no literacy at all. Short videos do not rely on anything literate—not scripts, professions, budgets, education, organization or institutions—nothing that used to underlie the broadcasting (centralized, top-down) electronic media of the late literate era. In both watching and making short videos, no literate skills are needed—not reading, writing or even texting. All that’s required is a connected smartphone, and you join the global carnival in the Global Village—an oral medium digitally recorded and delivered, extremely affordable to consume and produce.

Because of the incredible growth in time spent on short videos, their “deliterating” effect is escalating far beyond the postliterate “capabilities” of radio and television. TV and radio allowed for nonliterate consumption, but those who produced TV and radio shows were “very literate”—they had prestigious educations and employed sophisticated literate theories. They organized the world according to cognitive and social protocols set by books: TV and radio shows were linear, logically structured, logically complete in each piece.

Short videos have none of this. They immerse both their creators and viewers in randomly cut snippets of someone’s flow of reality—sometimes staged but never scripted, with no beginning or end, no structuring or organization. It’s just the same everyday flow of living that oralist tribal individuals would have—but cut and delivered by digital means. Not a single touch of literate cognitive organization—not in consumption, not even in production.

Hollywood was once called “The Dream Factory”—a part of the spectacle later exposed by Debord. Watching Hollywood movies, the masses could taste the fictional lives of others—much more pleasant and spectacular than their own. Short videos offer everyone a chance to peek into others’ semireal, semistaged—simulated—lives in highly consumable and tiny pieces, but nearly endlessly. Moreover, short videos offer everyone to become a dream maker and display snippets of their own lives, playfully staged for admiration.

All social media do this, but in “traditional” posting, you still need at least some residual literacy skills—texting—to elicit a response. Reels freed user self-expression not only from elite control but also from literacy altogether. The staged replay of life scenes is essentially a “human replay,” to use the metaphor of media ecologist Paul Levinson. The affordance of replaying ourselves in movie-like short stories and peeking into the lives of others is so seductive and potentially beneficial for social recognition that literacy becomes a small sacrifice—the fee spectators pay to become spectacular themselves and direct the new global spectacle.