Encouraging Video Literacy Is Digital Economic Development

In a great meeting this morning with Ed Bowie, executive director of Acadiana Open Channel, Lafayette's public access TV station, I had a profound realization: increasing video literacy within a community is an essential component to 21st century economic development.

What sparked this line of thinking was Ed's analogy of how the opportunities fiber presents are on par with the printing press for having the potential to redefine how society communicates.

I combined this with the idea that while print was the dominant medium of human communication, now video reins supreme as the dominant medium of the 21st century.

What this means is that increasingly we're communicating with each other and transferring knowledge via video rather than via print.

The economic characteristics of businesses based around video are remarkable.

Imagine having an industry that manufactures goods using basic tools and almost no raw materials, and distributes them instantaneously for almost no cost for transfer or storage.

That's what video is, or at least what it can be through fiber. You use cameras and mics and lights and editing hardware and software to produce video that's either delivered live or on-demand for pennies. Beyond the initial investment in equipment, the main cost is time with relatively few natural resources being needed to continue producing more video.

So with video becoming the dominant medium for human communication, fiber essentially serving as its printing press, and video-based fiber-powered activities having incredible economic characteristics, I see clear reason for emphasizing video literacy as an act of economic development.

By video literacy, I mean the ability of individuals and organizations to shoot, edit, and distribute video. By increasing our ability to use video we can become leaders in figuring out how to harness this relatively new medium.

To put an even finer point on this: if you're a community with fiber, you have the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of building expertise around the 21st century printing press.

So I encourage all fiber communities to consider investing heavily in developing video literacy among your individuals and organizations, in particular by supporting our community media centers and public access channels.

While the impact of fiber extends beyond video in particular into applications, the ability to create video itself is a massive component of the digital economy.