Facebook official predicts end of written word

Quartz

In five years time Facebook “will be definitely mobile, it will be probably all video,” said Nicola Mendelsohn, who heads up Facebook’s operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, at a conference in London. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, has already noted that video will be more and more important for the platform. But Mendelsohn went further, suggesting that stats showed the written word becoming all but obsolete, replaced by moving images and speech.

“The best way to tell stories in this world, where so much information is coming at us, actually is video,” Mendelsohn said. “It conveys so much more information in a much quicker period. So actually the trend helps us to digest much more information.”

In the room, there was a perceptible shifting—perhaps because the written word seems a rather major aspect of civilization to dispatch with so quickly. But it won’t disappear entirely, Mendelsohn assured the crowd: “You’ll have to write for the video.”

Of course, Facebook has algorithmically promoted video, so I asked Mendelsohn whether the company was pushing that shift away from text posts. She insisted the change is user-driven, an organic shift that was obvious by looking at the numbers.

Virtual reality will grow and 360 video will be “commonplace,” she said. “We’re seeing a year-on-year decline of text…If I was having a bet I’d say: video, video, video.”