Too busy to read?

cannot link from this sentence to only those exact "passages" inside an online movie. We don't have the equivalent of a hyperlink for film yet. With true screen fluency, I'd be able to cite specific frames of a film or specific items in a frame.

In 30 years it will be. The tendrils of hyperlinks will keep expanding to connect all the bits. The events that take place in a console game will be as searchable as the news. You'll be able to look for things that occur inside a YouTube video. Say you want to find the exact moment on your phone when your sister received her acceptance to college.

The holy grail of visuality is findability--the ability to search the library of all movies the same way Google can search the web, and find a particular focus deep within. You want to be able to type key terms, or simply say, "bicycle plus dog," and then retrieve scenes in any film featuring a dog and a bicycle. In an instant you could locate the moment in The Wizard of Oz when the witchy Miss Gulch rides off with Toto. Even better, you want to be able to ask Google to find all the other scenes in all movies similar to that scene. That ability is almost here.