I read as much text as ever, and semiliterate lowbrows read as little as ever. None of the numbers that article presents suggest otherwise. Sure, there's a lot of consumption of non-text media, too, but we're a long way from post-text yet.
That said, I read just as much as ever. Though I read far more non-fiction and news than I used to. I used to read more fiction and poetry. The easy access to content gives me too much to read, in fact!
My reading list grows daily. I simply can't keep up. And don't get me started on going down the Wiki-hole
There's a great white emptiness on top, but when you scroll down there's some text. No media though. But I'm using private browsing mode which has tracking protection enabled and disables local storage among other things. I guess they don't feature-detect those things.
And yet I still instinctively skip over links I see to video/audio content as it generally takes much more time, concentration, and attention to get value/information out of them.
I met someone recently who had a huge learning disability with reading, to the point that they are functionally illiterate. It really underscored just how essential textual communication has become in our world. Even menial jobs require literacy.
Who is this mythical people who consume video news? I can't stand the slow pace and lack of details.
I very much prefer text, where I can skip boring or redundant parts, or radio where I can work in something else while I get updated on recent developments.
Animals have grunted at each other for hundreds of millions of years, and human speech has slowly evolved from this. Text however was an instant revolution, a complete game changer. I don't think text is going away.
The immediate benefits of text are that text allows information to be stored, verified, indexed, and searched (assuming it was indexed correctly). It's only very recently that these same benefits have become available for audio and video. But they are still way behind text. For example, it's a lot easier to quote a snippet of text than to cut and paste a scene from a video sequence.
Tangential: I follow cnn.com because they matter and I think we need to read widely these days. I just couldn't deal with the aggressive, auto-play video all over the place, so last week I wrote a userscript to monitor all of their pages for video and strip it. My cnn.com experience jut got a lot better.
I was aware. Thanks for mentioning that. Personally, I think that the layout of the site, the size of things, the number of clicks it takes to get to particular information are all important when my goal is to understand what messages they are selling, not just to consume their content.
I watch the full pbs newshour video on youtube everyday — it’s a good general overview of daily happenings, if I want details for anything I can look up texts
This is one thing that drives me crazy about the Minecraft Modding community. Instead of properly documenting a mod on a Wiki someone will make an hour long YouTube video that takes forever to get to the point and misses a lot of the nuance. Not only does it take forever, but going back to find recipes or specific construction restrictions means scrubbing through the video looking for those 2 seconds worth of frames that had the relevant information. Even the old standards of the FTB wikis are now terribly out of date as everybody moved on to pure video.
I'm with you 100% on technical instructional videos in general. It is absolutely the worst medium for the simple fact that you usually need to go back over the steps multiple times the first time you do something.
yes! my company gives all developers a pluralsight license but i find it basically useless. I spend half my time pausing and replaying video to follow along. so much more efficient to have it laied out in text.
Another place where it came up, but probably on purpose was our annual security refresher course. In the old days this was basically a slide deck with a multiple choice quiz at the end. You could breeze through it in 10 minutes because the content was always the same and the questions were obvious.
That was replaced by an unskippable video system where you have to sit through a full hour of people not emailing their passwords to phishers and remembering to lock their screen when they walk away from their desk. It's miserable.
A combo of 10 mins of fame and ad revenue i guess.
And i strongly agree. I hate to go searching for solutions to some computer problem only to find page after page of videos demonstrating step by step how to do something.
Reminds me of when i compared Cisco and Microsoft official training material on their products. The former was 99% text, as the interface to the routers were text based. The latter was a much larger tome, yet held mostly full page image of multiple choice dialogs and wizards with a small amount of descriptive text underneath.
Safe to say i learned more from the former than the latter...
Are these videos on youtube?
Youtube has an auto transcribe to text feature from what I've read.. any way to make a script that takes thsi vids and reuploads them to youtube to get the transcription and then repost those to a new blog and include a link back to the original video?
When I scan docs I need to ctrl+f to find the terms I'm looking for to be quicker in knowing if these are the docs I'm looking for.
As I plan to teach some code using minecraft and modding this summer, the idea of having to watch a bunch video during the process frightens me. There must be a quick search function made somehow.
What these "[insert communication medium] is dead!" proclamations don't take into account is that everyone learns differently. Even with developers. Some will wade through detailed documentation, others want a quick GIF showing how the API does something, some just want some screenshots, and so on.
This has nothing to do with the "reach" and "power" of video, and everything to do with the fact that video ads are more valuable. Source: I work in online advertising.
Video is a supply- rather than demand-side phenomenon. Or rather, it's an interaction between publishers and advertisers rather than publishers and readers.
Plain text is the only format that has survived from the beginning of computing. It will probably survive for the next 80 years of computing too. I'll stick with it :-)
For me text is perhaps the most liberating means of communicating thought. Writing requires no investment or specials tools, and anyone can produce professional, groundbreaking work. And, of all the means of expressing thought, text is the only medium that truly frees the mind from the body. The quality of writing does not depend on what the author’s voice sounds like or what they look like or how fast they can think and react.
The internet promised to give everyone a voice and by moving away from text we would give up an important part of that ideal. There’s a place for audio and video sure, but I deeply hope there will also always be a place and an audience for writing
Western governments have been pushing for internet connection speeds far in excess of what's needed for text for exactly this reason.
The competitive advantage from large capital resources is far greater with video than with text. As the internet turns into TV 2.0, the little people can crawl back under whatever rock they live under and the old order of media-democracy is restored.
if They’re pushing, it is in a weird and ineffective way which neglects the last mile issue and supports the like of Comcast and Verizon killing something like Google Fiber with nonsensical bureaucratic hurdles.
As conspiracy theories go, it’s a particularly shabby one.
In the last 23 years, I've seen the Internet evolve from primarily a text based interface, which encouraged long form writing, and line-by-line-dissection of long form writing, to a medium that is primarily pictorial, and increasingly video based, where close reading of long form stuff is discouraged by code and design.
Postman himself declined even to look at the web in 1999, when I started reading his books, and he passed away in 2004. In 1999, I thought the Internet was part of the solution to the problem he was writing about. Today, the Internet is a bigger problem than television and the movies.
And the shift towards pictorial communication is rapidly approaching levels where it's a threat to civilization. Fark and Failblog are good amusements, but even the briefest look at 4chan will show you, we're in deep shit.
The thing is, the Internet isn't just the Internet.
Twitter can be criticized not for how well or how badly the company polices its users, but also in a medium-is-the-message way. Twitter is a cesspool of hate because the 140 character limit makes it useless for more than playground name calling.
Facebook is part of the problem not just because of Facebook's policies but because it's an interface that pushes blogging into microblogging.
Compare to Livejourbal, Wordpress, or dare I say it, Metafilter, all of which are better by design. (But don't get too smug. There's room for improvement. And it's still all stuff you're looking at with a tabbed browser, and it's always tempting to tab away.)
Or compare to Instapaper. I've removed Facebook and Twitter from my phone, and now when I;m out and about and being a phone zombie, I'm at least reading 1000-2000 word essays that I loaded onto the Instapaper app previously. It's made me a lot happier. But I am sad to report that I still have not regained the long form writing ability I had 15 years ago.
4chan is a threat to human civilization because of its use of images? I think you'll be happy to hear that one of the most common forms of 4chan post is "greentext", a specific kind of long form story. Some of these break the character count cap by many, many posts. And many of these get sizable reactions from the userbase.
4chan, like life, is what you make of it.
If you want to regain your long form writing ability, you could try taking a Moleskine or small pad with you when you travel. You can use it as a way to help create content while you're out and about, as a replacement for your phone.
Additionally, if you're tech inclined, setting up a blog has become easier than ever before.
This is a bit hyperbolic, but it contains some truth. It's part of a larger trend of well sorting people by capability that started with mainstream adoption of sending kids from their home towns to universities and has continued as the economy evolved along with software and automation.
The bubble I'm in discusses topics ranges so many arcane fields, but my addition to the bubble came at the cost of my childhood community loosing one of their more intelligent members. Facebook, Twitter, etc is just another layer on top of that.
My hope in the long run is that Gataca will address this problem and we'll get enough intelligent and unaggressive people to handle the exponential power increase that capable individuals have.
The idea of curating the news didn't come about because of some big illuminati conspiracy, it's because loud tactless assholes tend to drown everybody else out given the opportunity. Call it the paradox of free speech.
Having your information controlled by someone is bad, but so is having no filter at all, and a middle ground is difficult to achieve and in some ways impossible.
What a bunch of BS. This is pretty much lauding a return to the days of the cave man, where the only way to communicate information is to draw pictures or pass on an oral history. No, no, and hell no.
Frankly I find a lot of publishers would rather people consume their video content as video ads pay more, rather than users preferring the video content. This occasionally leads to that most awful of abominations, news videos that are just text and a slideshow (or just text!) with no text option to view it.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadindeed, perhaps verbal/visual communication is just 'catching up' to text after millenia
I definitely write more. I probably write more on my phone than in total, pre-internet. Maybe I'm one of the Philistines.
That said, I read just as much as ever. Though I read far more non-fiction and news than I used to. I used to read more fiction and poetry. The easy access to content gives me too much to read, in fact!
My reading list grows daily. I simply can't keep up. And don't get me started on going down the Wiki-hole
In OP's terminology, I think we are the literate lowbrows.
I very much prefer text, where I can skip boring or redundant parts, or radio where I can work in something else while I get updated on recent developments.
The immediate benefits of text are that text allows information to be stored, verified, indexed, and searched (assuming it was indexed correctly). It's only very recently that these same benefits have become available for audio and video. But they are still way behind text. For example, it's a lot easier to quote a snippet of text than to cut and paste a scene from a video sequence.
https://openuserjs.org/scripts/braindongle/CNN_remove_video/...
http://lite.cnn.io/en
This is one thing that drives me crazy about the Minecraft Modding community. Instead of properly documenting a mod on a Wiki someone will make an hour long YouTube video that takes forever to get to the point and misses a lot of the nuance. Not only does it take forever, but going back to find recipes or specific construction restrictions means scrubbing through the video looking for those 2 seconds worth of frames that had the relevant information. Even the old standards of the FTB wikis are now terribly out of date as everybody moved on to pure video.
That was replaced by an unskippable video system where you have to sit through a full hour of people not emailing their passwords to phishers and remembering to lock their screen when they walk away from their desk. It's miserable.
And i strongly agree. I hate to go searching for solutions to some computer problem only to find page after page of videos demonstrating step by step how to do something.
Reminds me of when i compared Cisco and Microsoft official training material on their products. The former was 99% text, as the interface to the routers were text based. The latter was a much larger tome, yet held mostly full page image of multiple choice dialogs and wizards with a small amount of descriptive text underneath.
Safe to say i learned more from the former than the latter...
When I scan docs I need to ctrl+f to find the terms I'm looking for to be quicker in knowing if these are the docs I'm looking for.
As I plan to teach some code using minecraft and modding this summer, the idea of having to watch a bunch video during the process frightens me. There must be a quick search function made somehow.
Video is a supply- rather than demand-side phenomenon. Or rather, it's an interaction between publishers and advertisers rather than publishers and readers.
The internet promised to give everyone a voice and by moving away from text we would give up an important part of that ideal. There’s a place for audio and video sure, but I deeply hope there will also always be a place and an audience for writing
The competitive advantage from large capital resources is far greater with video than with text. As the internet turns into TV 2.0, the little people can crawl back under whatever rock they live under and the old order of media-democracy is restored.
As conspiracy theories go, it’s a particularly shabby one.
In the last 23 years, I've seen the Internet evolve from primarily a text based interface, which encouraged long form writing, and line-by-line-dissection of long form writing, to a medium that is primarily pictorial, and increasingly video based, where close reading of long form stuff is discouraged by code and design.
Postman himself declined even to look at the web in 1999, when I started reading his books, and he passed away in 2004. In 1999, I thought the Internet was part of the solution to the problem he was writing about. Today, the Internet is a bigger problem than television and the movies.
And the shift towards pictorial communication is rapidly approaching levels where it's a threat to civilization. Fark and Failblog are good amusements, but even the briefest look at 4chan will show you, we're in deep shit.
The thing is, the Internet isn't just the Internet.
Twitter can be criticized not for how well or how badly the company polices its users, but also in a medium-is-the-message way. Twitter is a cesspool of hate because the 140 character limit makes it useless for more than playground name calling.
Facebook is part of the problem not just because of Facebook's policies but because it's an interface that pushes blogging into microblogging.
Compare to Livejourbal, Wordpress, or dare I say it, Metafilter, all of which are better by design. (But don't get too smug. There's room for improvement. And it's still all stuff you're looking at with a tabbed browser, and it's always tempting to tab away.)
Or compare to Instapaper. I've removed Facebook and Twitter from my phone, and now when I;m out and about and being a phone zombie, I'm at least reading 1000-2000 word essays that I loaded onto the Instapaper app previously. It's made me a lot happier. But I am sad to report that I still have not regained the long form writing ability I had 15 years ago.
4chan, like life, is what you make of it.
If you want to regain your long form writing ability, you could try taking a Moleskine or small pad with you when you travel. You can use it as a way to help create content while you're out and about, as a replacement for your phone.
Additionally, if you're tech inclined, setting up a blog has become easier than ever before.
4chan is what I make of it.
But it's also what the rest of society makes of it.
That's why we're in deep shit.
The bubble I'm in discusses topics ranges so many arcane fields, but my addition to the bubble came at the cost of my childhood community loosing one of their more intelligent members. Facebook, Twitter, etc is just another layer on top of that.
My hope in the long run is that Gataca will address this problem and we'll get enough intelligent and unaggressive people to handle the exponential power increase that capable individuals have.
For now, stability at all costs please.
The Internet gives voice to the voiceless!
followed by:
Oh shit, they were voiceless for a reason.
The idea of curating the news didn't come about because of some big illuminati conspiracy, it's because loud tactless assholes tend to drown everybody else out given the opportunity. Call it the paradox of free speech.
Having your information controlled by someone is bad, but so is having no filter at all, and a middle ground is difficult to achieve and in some ways impossible.