Facebook's Video Autoplay: Annoying, but a Possible Way to Bridge Cultures Across Languages?10/2/2015
Screen grab from "Dance Shadowstory", by Facebook user Hakim Fitdance.
Facebook's feature prompting videos to play automatically on user's news feeds once they pass them has been around for the better part of a year. And last month, the general consensus seemed to turn from apathy to outrage, as the autoplay feature ended up inadvertently broadcasting a clip of a gristly murder of a Virginia newscaster to millions of Facebook users. A Google search for "Facebook video autoplay" mostly reveals entries on how to turn the feature off, many of them dated from late August, right after the killing took place.
But since there are still sizable chunks of the global population who have not yet turned the feature off, it's having an unexpected effect: allowing videos to go viral regardless of their language. A couple days ago, I came across a video of an intricate dance routine that - I have to admit - caught my attention in part because of the autoplay. You can watch the video here:
But what really got my attention was the caption, which reads:
"Bonjour les copains, As you may of noticed, this isn't in English. It's in French. And since French is one of the languages I translate in, allow me to clear this up for you non-francophones: "Hello everyone, Hmm... Maybe in hindsight it's better that this text didn't appear in English, it's kind of tacky, though it just might sound profound if you're a sophomore in high school. But hey, maybe that's exactly why it went viral - people didn't focus on the text. Up until now, the main way videos spread across the internet is by being identified by text searches (identifying speech in audio is still a daunting task for computers). That means that if the text description for a video is written in, say, Swedish, it's only likely to go viral in places that speak Swedish. English may be the only exception; videos with descriptions in English are likely to go viral among non-native English speakers, since there are so many of them. But the same doesn't work in reverse; native English speakers don't generally find out about clips in foreign languages. In fact, a good number of native English speakers make a pretty good living just by mining foreign language viral clips and showing them to other native English speakers who wouldn't find out about them otherwise. I'm looking at you, John Oliver. But take a clip that is appealing visually, and automatically start it playing in front of people who wouldn't otherwise search for text in a foreign language, and you've got instant viral video potential. In the case of this video, it doesn't seem to have caught on yet with English speakers, but it's a hit among Spanish speakers and, oddly enough, people from Turkey, judging from the comments section: Now, I'm an optimist, and I also believe wholeheartedly in the benefits, and also the necessities, of bridging the language barriers that all too often encourage hostilities between people from different parts of the world. Sure, I find the Facebook video autoplay as annoying as anyone else does, but maybe by making videos from around the world go viral, it's doing us all a favor? |
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