> 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.
I'm waiting for the day I can Ctrl-F on a Youtube video, say a key phrase, then the video jumps to the point where someone says the key phrase (or the video is about the key phrase).
Meanwhile, text is so much more easily consumable. (Youtube Premium junkie here, BTW.)
Technically, you can already do that today, as many youtube-videos have now autogenerated subtitles. Someone just need to build a tool utilizing them for this. Though, to be fair, the quality of those subtitles is sometimes a bit questionable. And they are not available in all languages. Especially if you want a different language then what is spoken in the video.
But yes, of course this is another case in which text can shine because of its weakness. Simplicity can be beneficial.
They do this already. Some google search results will present a snippet of a Youtube video most relevant. Here's an example of a search query with such a snippet.
There are coursera lectures that actually work like this with full transcripts where you can search the text and clicking on the text takes you to the correct part of the video.
Sometimes when I search for an exercise on google, it will link me to a segment of a video with the appropriate exercise. So I guess google is on this.
Not directly related to YouTube, but I found a site called playphrase.me that will let you search for text able show your clips on movies where that text is said. I love it and this comment reminded me.
>>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.
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...)
Text is far superior to video for conveying (most types of) information. It's not so great for building individual relationships. An ideal VR metaverse would be focused on the latter.
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.
Text is mightiest; but you should use "video" instead of "image". Video is the natural visual medium to convey an essay, not a still image.
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.
Your point ironically works directly against you here. Your point is basically "describe an image without using images", it demonstrates how constrained the utility of images is, basically only useful for their own sake.
I don't consider text a weak medium, but would contend that the strength of the medium is its efficacy in conveying a portrayed concept.
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.
One bit: “the book was better” crowd are a small vocal minority of the people who watch the book inspired movie. Most moviegoers will never have read the book.
Can you name some works first conceived as books where the movie adaptation was superior?
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.
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?
"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.