I’d definitely agree with you about text being more popular. I think there are several reasons for this too.

Certainly there’s the privacy elements as you said - I’m the same way, with the telephone too in fact. I hate trying to present myself when I know other people can hear what’s going on. I still shut the doors any time I have to record something to camera or make a phone call
On top of this to a large degree I think there are comfort elements as well. I’ve seen this time and time again with the web conferences I’ve facilitated, and even my own tinkerings with recording clips for YouTube.

There tend two be two types of people when it comes to video - those that love to be on camera, and those that hate it.

In the case of the latter, the second you point a camera at them they panic and have trouble doing or discussing things they wouldn’t have trouble doing were the camera not present. Personally I’ve found this to be the case with YouTube as well. I’ve gotten better at it over time, but it’s taken a whole lot of practice.

I think if you’re looking at integrating any sort of video into your activities - educational or otherwise - this is a really important factor to consider. I found it’s really useful to go through things numerous times before ever turning on the camera, to let people acclimate to the experience so they know what to expect. There’s a lot of reassurance involved in this too because most people are really self-conscious about their video images.

Explaining what the technology is and how it works seems to help as well I’ve found. Something about dispelling to mystery about how your image gets from here to on the web seems to help people feel a bit more at ease about what’s happening.

Come to think of it all of the above factors seem to point to aspects that support the theory that video results in different behaviour than text. There are some profound implications in knowing you’re actually being seen and not just read - it removes a huge amount of the anonymity that text affords I think.

Thanks for the comment - very thought-provoking
Cheers,

Mike

I wonder if video and audio commenting will ever be as big as text though because it requires a certain level of privacy to participate, e.g. I can write this comment from my desk at work but could never do a video comment because my colleagues would notice / be disturbed by the noise.