to 24 watch TV two hours per day but read for leisure only seven minutes per day [ 2]. You Tube reports that “[o]ver 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on You Tube—that’s almost an hour for every person on Earth, and 50 percent more than last year [2011]... 100 hours of video are uploaded to You Tube every minute” [ 3]. Video is undeniably an increasingly prominent consumer communication medium.

However, it is our observation that video is not widely perceived as a full-fledged document, dismissed as a medium that, at worst, gilds over substance and, at best, simply augments text-based communications.

Online video is incredibly rich. A

15-minute home-improvement You Tube tutorial might include 1,500 words of narration, 100 or more significant keyframes showing a visual change from multiple perspectives, several animated objects, references to other examples, a tool list, comments from viewers, and a host of other metadata.

Furthermore, video accounts for 90 percent of worldwide Internet traffic [ 1]. For new startups, it has become de rigueur to introduce new products with video rather than text and still graphics.

This is likely because people spend more time consuming video than text. The NEA reports that Americans ages 15

OInsights → A media bricoleur authors new digital artifacts using whatever is at hand. → When different types of media are integrated into a document, knowledge can be conveyed more comprehensively. → Authoring and reuse tools for dynamic, visual media should match the power and ease of use of their static textual media nalogs.

Supporting Media Bricoleurs

Scott Carter, Matthew Cooper, Laurent Denoue,
John Doherty, and Vikash Rugoobur,

FX Palo Alto Laboratory