As a new audio-visual medium popular in the Internet, the rise of short video may be revolutionary inmediahistory. Short video is a kind of civilian media in the post-literary era, which awakens and stimulates the communication instinct of ordinary people. The biggest social value of short video is its “public record” value. Different from the imperial notes in the literal age, countless civilian notes appear in this short video age, whose in?uence on the society was synchronic and diachronic. One of the diachronic effects of the short video is that it produces a new kind of historical data, which is very valuable for the study of social history. Short video has its own media logic andhistorical sociological effect, and the appearance of the unknownis not the gift of the power, but a “spillover effect” of Internet commercial innovation. To interpret the medium of short videos, we need a kind of historical hindsight.