"A Picture says more than a thousand words."
> Kids can do video calls with their smartphones but prefer texting.
Because text is asynchronous, and persistent. Text is a weak medium, but with specific strengths which can beat others in certain situation if they can played well.
> We could discuss Hacker News stories with video chat but we prefer text.
I guess you haven't discovered yet youtube, twitch, instagram, tik tok...
> News and politics junkies prefer reading text tweets on Twitter to watching talking news anchors.
No, they do not? Some do, not all. If anything, the people reading tweets are the one you should trust the least. But that's for reasons of twitter, not text.
> Billions and billions spent on making movies as polished as possible, yet "I thought the book was better" is what we always hear.
Which is proof that text is the weaker medium, because text demands the readers to fill the holes, which is for some a beneficial experience. And on the other side, pictures also demands more work to let them shine. This would be an actual valid argument which will make metaverse problematic. There will be a high chance of 90% of the content just being halfassed trash.
> The quarterly reports outlining its financial losses will be written in text.
More like diagrams.
Meanwhile, text is so much more easily consumable. (Youtube Premium junkie here, BTW.)
But yes, of course this is another case in which text can shine because of its weakness. Simplicity can be beneficial.
It is indeed async & persistent, but those are not it's only strengths.
Text is ALSO highly searchable, and skim-able. I can search and jump right to the point I want, I can rapidly skim through parts I'm not so interested in and then focus and examine deeply and repeatedly the part that is of interest. Or, I can read it sequentially like a video/audio stream. In contrast, searching vid/audio is cumbersome, frustrating, and time-wasting at best.
Text is ALSO has a much higher information density than video, except for situations where moving pictures actually add to the information, as in video of a specifi event, mechanism working, etc. Most of the time, just listening to a talking head is far slower, and harder to remember than reading (where I can read rapidly forward, then back and re-read key bits, often without even thinking about it; w/ video, I'd need to interrupt the train of thought, hit [back], try to go back just the right number of seconds, then re-view, etc. - useful ONLY when the vid id of an event, not of just reading info.)
Moreover, text is more direct. To make a really good video usually requires a well-thought out script written in advance, from which one reads - I'd rather just read the script. And when it is something like an interview with a noted expert, I'd usually rather just read the transcript, for the above reasons.
You actually highlight the problem with video: >>There will be a high chance of 90% of the content just being halfassed trash.
Absolutely correct - most of it will be rushed out without the solid base of a test-based script and screenplay, which would in most cases be preferable...
Text really is —still— one of the key defining inventions of humanity, and I have no expectations that a "metaverse" will beat it soon. (Now if it can start reading text directly out of my brain without typing/dictating, and I can edit it on the fly — THAT will be really something...)
Often, people's considered thoughts will give a better connection than their offhand comments. Many a great romance or friendship has grown and been preserved by handwritten letters sent via the post.
In thinking about my last comment, what I'd really want in a metaverse is the ability for the participants' thoughts to be scanned, textualized, and edited via thought transfer, then displayed above/beside them, so we can both read and speak about things in real-time, at the speed of thought/reading, instead of speech. It could get really interesting...
It is sooo common to feel that we can't communicate nearly as fast as we think, even when the lot of us are very fast talkers...
If I give you a thousand word essay, good luck crating an image that conveys the same information. I mean you could photograph the essay, but then we're back to text again.
Let's consider a philosophical essay as something highly abstract, then its video counterpart would be mostly audio (transcript of the essay). In other cases, e.g. a scientific report, video might be easier content to consume but producing a proper video for that take much more time than writing a 6-page text. The video as the visual medium counterpart has lot more complexity and not always worth it.
Consider a presentation: text+visual+audio, it's more capable to convey the essence of the material. So all these boils down to what is the perfect combination for a particular use case. From short to long image/video, from Instagram, TikTok to YouTube, each multimedia choice lead to different use cases.
And text is the mightiest not because that it necessarily convey better, but because it can:
1. produced/maintained/transferred with the least complexity than others, it's much more efficient representation in this regard.
2. It can represent with most rigorous detail (e.g. consider a math paper)
3. It has the easiest retrieval and mining
4. BUT It usually needs more effort to consume
It's always nice to choose the proper combination of text+visual+audio+interaction. AR/VR only add one ingredient (if you consider it a new one) to this whole toolbox we as humankind are building. It makes our communication much more complex, and much more powerful. However, at the end, the most basic one which is text will remain the mightiest. We may need to wait for some bizarre telepathy technology between brains to change the status quo.
Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies. Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand, dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain, In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp, Dare its deadly terrors clasp!
When the stars threw down their spears And water'd heaven with their tears: Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger Tyger burning bright, In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Or are we back at pictures? Because text is generally just a collection of tiny little pictures.
You state this as fact while it's extremely debatable. What is your measure of a mediums strength?
In that sense, text is a strong medium for certain things (like a dataset) and bad for others (like conveying the beauty of a camera pan within a movie that conveys a miniature story).
I've noticed that fanboyism of old AND new technologies is often only grabbing half of the story. We still use "obsolete" technologies, since none of them ever become completely bereft of potential purpose with the development of new technologies, even when they become hipster-niche-chic. Horses or tape storage, for example.
Reading for pleasure requires an individual with a greater degree of imagination and intelligence vs staring at a screen and often takes a much greater time investment and yet often offers a broader set of experiences because one needn't convince someone to invest 100s of millions animating fantastic scenes if one author sitting at a typewriter or a keyboard can produce as vivid an experience in the mind of the reader.
Movies financial and runtime constraints often rob the source material of much of its richness and the description of the players emotions, thoughts, and state of mind is harder to communicate aptly without seeming clunky and expositional.
I’m saying yes, we hear lots of people say “the book was better” and in most cases that’s true. However, most people will never have read the books movies based on books were based on, so it’s kind of a pointless Pyrrhic argument.
That said, many will claim that The Godfather movie was better than the book -I never read the book, so I cannot offer an opinion.
But, yes, normally, in order to capture the nuance and details of a book you’d need a multi part series.
I think I tried, lo so many moons ago. And IIRC, I can confirm that yes, The Godfather is one of the few exceptions that proves the rule.
> "A Picture says more than a thousand words."
One of those two is bullshit (and always has been)... And it's not the first one.
> > We could discuss Hacker News stories with video chat but we prefer text.
> I guess you haven't discovered yet youtube, twitch, instagram, tik tok...
And yet, here you are discussing this -- not on youtube, twitch, instagram, tik tok...
> > Billions and billions spent on making movies as polished as possible, yet "I thought the book was better" is what we always hear.
> Which is proof that text is the weaker medium, because text demands the readers to fill the holes, which is for some a beneficial experience.
This was, by my count, the third time in your comment you claimed that "text is the weaker medium" -- each time in response to an example illustrating how text is superior. So basically, your definition of "weaker" is... What the rest of the world would call stronger, right?
How many people watched game of thrones? How many people read all of the published books in a song of ice and fire? The book might be better but movies and TV are a lot more popular.
Looking at something similar, the Lord of the Rings had around 80-90 million viewers (very rough estimation from the global box office [3]) while the book sold 150 million copies [4], so the books seem to have fared better.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Game_of_Thrones_episod...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Song_of_Ice_and_Fire#cite_no...
[3] - https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt0120737/?ref_=bo_tt_ta...
[4] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-arts-tolkien-novel-idUSL1...
I've purchased all of the books you've mentioned, but watched the films/series via other means that won't show up in the statistics, and I'm not alone in doing so or vice-versa.
Books like Lord of the Rings gets passed through generations and loaned around as well, so I'm sure the number of people who've read LotR is a lot higher than the number of people who bought the books.
The first libraries were private. Sometimes they were opened to fee-paying members. Netflix is a library.
Public libraries are the "new" thing. But not the only thing.
All Netflix cares about is profits. All libraries care about is sharing. They are two very different entities except for the fact that they deal with media. They are more different than they are similar.
Capitalism has really fucked us up if this is a common sentiment.
Umm isn't that just on the date it airs? That's like comparing it to the people who read the book in the first month (year?).
There is no way as many people read the books as saw the tv show. I would bet it's at least one order of magnitude difference, if not possibly more.
Isn't this viewers in one country (USA), versus books sold worldwide?
> Looking at something similar, the Lord of the Rings had around 80-90 million viewers (very rough estimation from the global box office [3]) while the book sold 150 million copies [4], so the books seem to have fared better.
Viewerships in Box-Office are limited to a specific timeframe and location. They do not include television, private viewing on streaming-services/DVD/etc., later screenings in cinemas around the world. And the movies only exist for 20 years, while the booksales are from 3x that timeframe.
And finally, those are exceptional successful books and franchises. What about an average book? How many people have seen Forest Gump and how many actually read the book even decades later after the initial hype?
The most amazing special effects in the world can't match my imagination for fidelity and if they did, they'd still not be mine.
I've noticed that the book to TV/movies I like aren't because they are good adaptations so much as they are close to what I imagined.
It's rare that happens but when it does it makes the TV show a deeply enjoyable, Season 1 of Altered Carbon and all the seasons of The Expanse did/do it but not much else in the last 5 years has.
IMO, the best movies are NOT adaptations.
When you watch a movie, your eyes and ears has to collect the information, and some part of your brain has to turn that into a log of events. You have to do a lot of work to do to keep up with whats going on.
When you are reading, you don't need to do all that work, the author has already decided what is important.
I think the two mediums aren't really comparable, they both just happen to be good ways to tell stories.
But the moment is over and now it’s just another show in a vast universe of streaming options.
Entertainment is often more enjoyable with rich sensory experiences and some amount of novelty. People with great imaginations are probably the folk who experience books that way but, for everyone else, rich media provides more entertainment value than text alone.
The Metaverse is entertainment. It might be great for parties, games and other virtual interactions/experiences but it's definitely more a medium for novelty and sensory excitement than for pure information exchange alone (obviously).
I often like to compare the post web 2.0 era (ubiquitous, high bandwidth, highly lubricated UIs) with mailing lists (limited, slow, bare). People think more before chatting on MLs, their messages can be short but mean a lot, or can be long and tell even more. Video feels a bit like the former.. you get more data, it's more pleasing for a while, but it doesn't give much more. Sometimes visual / geometric media add some value (when balanced and tuned to massage viewers mental model) but often its just redundant fat.
So much this. That effect is why I cringe every time I'm presented with an instructional video instead of text -- videos waste a lot of time to give me the information that could usually have been done in a page or two of text.
> Billions and billions spent on making movies as polished as possible, yet "I thought the book was better" is what we always hear.
The reason: the movie is often the worse copy of the book. Very often, movies get made of successful and often well-written books. So, the movie has a high hurdle to overcome to be even better than the book.
(if movies were made of "average" books, this would likely be different, but this typically makes no commercial sense)
On the other hand, literary offsprings (books based on and book spin-offs) are created from movie. These are, by the same reason, also typically worse than the movie.
Virtual medicine is the one thing that is really useful because the majority are of doctor visits are a waste of time and I go to the doctor a lot, if not once a week sometimes 3 in a single week. That doesn't even count the 2 times a week I usually have to go for a blood draw. Outside of the lab I honestly can't recall the last time in person part being necessary
Kids massively play and pay for games, games are the core of the appstores. They also listen to music and watch crazy hours of youtube.
Text won't die, but it's not the prime interface. Even texting is more and more sending gifs and stickers around.
But I agree with your comment, while also agreeing with part of the spirit of the parent comment. Of course videos can be high quality, and making a high quality video probably takes much more effort than making the same thing into an article.
But real-time chatting is not dense, it s in fact very reduntant with lots of information being discarded left and right, and avatats can still text each other. The idea of 3d stuff is just an evolution of that imho, a messenger with extra stuff
We have this stuff already btw, second life users do that every day, but Zuck didnt even mention it.
Also, they probably want to keep the nsfw aspect synonymous with Second Life out of the discussion.
I’m not sold on this. Twitter is more of a mechanism for group totalitarianism than productive conversation.
Sure it shifts parts of the cognitive load to those writing or reading it, but in my eyes if there is any meaningful societal future text would play a central role.
This is why I am no friend of the direction IT is taking nowadays. Although I didn't grew up with it myself, I wished people would have to learn working with a unix shell and programming languages just like you learn how to read and write.
Learning to read and write is certainly not easy, but it really pays off if a society teaches its members how to do it no theless. In my eyes learning text based computing is just the same
Try prefixing text with 15 lines of advertising text that you must read, and people will prefer video quickly. In the current world, I don’t click on 30s video quotes because it is prefixed by 30s of ads.
Well, there is that whole snapchat thing.
This is why longer series are so popular, see: the Mandalorian
It’s possible that as digital tools make it easier to make hundreds of hours of high quality content the ‘metaverse’ experience will become on par with the books.
Suggesting that a metaverse in VR is plausible has nothing to do with eradicating text. There will be plenty of it in there. People will not be welded into headsets and have their books torched, as the Nostradamuses want us to think.
I don't see the appeal of TikTok (though I haven't tried it), I much prefer skimming text than skimming through videos (let alone with sound). But it is incredibly popular, and a ton of people find video content addictive. To my surprise it isn't just popular among youth, but I have older smart senior software engineer friends (who didn't grow up surrounded by optimally addictive apps) who say it's amazing, at least once you let the algorithm converge.
So we shouldn't just assume that text will always prevail. Look at other seemingly amazing technologies/mediums that largely died or were at least hidden from the mainstream due to business reasons. These may be weak examples (I just woke up) but hopefully the gist of it is clear:
* RSS?
* I remember hearing that the alternatives to VHS and maybe blu-ray were technically superior but lost due to business reasons.
* Maybe Windows too, beat out technically superior alternatives because of business reasons
* Google+ apparently had a number of innovative features (like "circles"), but I barely know anyone who used it over facebook back in the day)
Now of course text content couldn't just "die", but perhaps the main companies hosting content could give strong incentives to produce video content instead of text, and control what the vast majority of people see. From what I understand: content producing companies (like CollegeHumor) that were super popular before Facebook were basically screwed when Facebook was the main way that people discovered content. Even though it was still possible to visit their website, the majority (or at least many) people would just watch whatever videos showed up on their facebook feed, so CollegeHumor took a huge hit. (I think that was what I read a while ago, anyway. I forget a lot of details so please correct me or add more information)
That scares the hell out of me: if a few tech companies ultimately control what the majority of people see, the content producers are basically chosen by the tech companies' algorithms. And the algorithms are ultimately going to optimize for profit, and not "quality content" or even "content that isn't harmful". (And more relevant to the comment I'm responding to: favouring ad heavy video over text). Potential up side: maybe it will be easier to filter out crap content if it all goes to video.
If people value quality content, quality content will be rewarded. If people don't care it won't. Some people just want to have a laugh and don't care about the production value of the video.
I have never tried to make money producing content on the internet. But I have found a few good content producers who make podcasts and post them to YouTube. I wish that they would also post transcripts and have an RSS feed, but they don't really have any incentive to do that. And I can't blame them: I don't think I would really pay any extra for it. And unless there are better content producers who show up and do those things, I'll probably still keep watching the same podcasts on YouTube.
So I am concerned that all the best content producers just doing whatever will make them money, and:
* ultimately they will probably produce content and host it with a big company.
* And that big company will probably do whatever it can to maximize profits
* (and presumably content providers will typically favour the company that pays them the best).
* And I worry that video content can make way, way more money than text, at least for certain content types.
Certainly I'm probably overstating the issues, but I think there's some truth to this. Look at what happens when you look up cooking recipes on the internet: you almost always get a big article and a bunch of garbage that no one wants. I think I read somewhere that they do that because a recipe can't be copyrighted without an article. If that's true, why isn't there a nice clean recipe site that doesn't have all the garbage in it? Perhaps even with a nifty database where I can filter based on ingredients and stuff that I have? I think the answer is that (#1) I don't look for new recipes that often, and (#2) I am willing to tolerate skimming through some garbage on the rare occasions that I do.
Kids can do video calls with their smartphones but prefer texting.
We could discuss Hacker News stories with video chat but we prefer text.
News and politics junkies prefer reading text tweets on Twitter to watching talking news anchors.
Once upon a time Amazon was a company that only sold books. Dried ink on dead trees. And in the early internet age this book seller outperformed many more "forward looking visionary" startups.
Billions and billions spent on making movies as polished as possible, yet "I thought the book was better" is what we always hear.
The Metaverse will be programmed with text.
The quarterly reports outlining its financial losses will be written in text.
When journalists ultimately write its obituary, they will write text.