Roger Ebert, Steve Jobs, Facebook and the astonishing power of video

Roger Ebert is the film critic at The Chicago Sun

He's also one of the most popular bloggers/tweeters around, with a massive following

Today, on Facebook, he posted a comment:

"Not Every Steve Jobs Idea Was Brilliant"

He then posted this video:



I am not sure whether Roger Ebert understands that this was published in The Onion, and that it is a satire.

Roger, if you are reading this, This Was A Satire. This Was Not Real.

In any event, what was more interesting to me was the commentary that followed the posting on Facebook.

Of the 83 comments (so far) more than half of them believed that the satire was a real news piece and that Jobs had in fact invented the keyboardless device.



And on and on....

Now, here is what I find interesting:

In the world of print, we are pretty good at being able to differentiate between 'real' and 'fake'.

When you walk into a supermarket and see a tabloid with a headline that screams:


You don't actually believe it.

OK, maybe Roger Ebert believes it, but most reasonable people don't.

That's because we have lived in a world of print for more than 500 years and we have developed a certain inherent filtering systemt that says 'most print is BS'. We take it all with a grain of salt, and move on to the produce department.

But with video we are different.

We have only lived in a world of video for about 50 years, and for 99% of that time, the content has been produced for us by people who 'know the truth'.

Video is still 'special', and as such, it carries a more powerful undercurrent to it.

Thus, we are more likely to believe what we see, and accept anything we see in video as inherently more 'truthful', even if it is clearly a satire.

Surely, over time, this will change. But it will take time.

In the meantime, as a culture, we still pay enormous homage to any video image and give it a much wider berth for believability.

Which could go a long way to explaining the impact of 'political advertising' and how some people keep getting snookered all the time.