> Human brains process it absurdly well considering there's nothing really built-in for it.
That's unclear. The sheer bitrate of reading suggests that it might tap into some deep structures -- hacking some parts of the visual and speech systems, if you prefer.
I don't click on HN video links because I find video slow and frustrating way to learn almost anything. Text is so random access -- you can skip over boring bits re-read hard bits, luxuriate in the really wonderful bits...all of which is hard in video. And in fact because the visual channel is so complex, I find reading more multimedia than video -- it's hard to feel cold when watching someone march through the snow, though a well written book can make me shiver with cold, even on a summer day.
I worked in television for a number of years in a technical behind-the-scenes capacity where I would have to flick switches and hit buttons on audio/scripted cues. Sometimes this would take me from the script for what I felt was a long time and I would always struggle to get back to where we were in the script.
'Surely we must have gone through two pages of this double spaced script that only uses one half of the page in a large font?'
No
Invariably my guess on 'script progress' would be considerably greater than actual progress made. Even under ideal conditions where this was the nth retake and I knew what was coming up I would still find myself over-estimating how many words had been presented to the cameras. Years of experience did not change this, I always over-estimated how much had been read, trying to take into account the 'slow baud rate' didn't help.
If you do ever have a transcript of a video play the video and start reading. See how far you get through the video when you have finished reading. Don't make it a race, read as you normally might, taking time out to Google stuff etc. and you will be amazed at how much quicker the printed word is.
Television is always slow paced, because it has to be comprehensible to people with a wide variety of language skills. Youtube, and most other video player software, has a speed setting with pitch correction. I watch everything at 1.5x speed which brings standard TV slow pacing up to natural fast-paced conversation speed. The majority of people here should have no problems understanding 1.5x speed. I don't watch live TV because 1x speed is too annoyingly slow.
Yeah I did a few "<subject> in 60 seconds" videos and the two lessons I learned from that? (1) They take hours and hours and hours of work to make. (2) Your script for the video must not contain more than 50 words, so you can say very little.
Not surprising: According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_(process)#Assessment reading for comprehension normally falls in the 200-400wpm range. 10 seconds to read 49 words is 294wpm, which is smack in the middle of that range.
It's a very strange statement indeed to claim that there's nothing built-in for it. We built it around / within our capabilities. It works so well precisely because we built it for ourselves, for what we are capable of.
It's almost like they're pretending it spontaneously came from nature (or always existed absent of humans and we discovered it) and we weren't evolved for it but somehow adapted to it. You could insert eg a bicycle into the same premise: we ride them absurdly well given there's nothing built into the brain for specifically riding a bicycle (except there is: balance, grasping acceleration, etc. - we designed them for our use just as we did text).
Those deep structure may be active, but reading was never in their design documentation. Our brains evolved to what they are today long before reading was a thing. The fact that we read so well is probably a hacked-together scheme tying together structures meant for pattern recognition and speech.
I see reading much like swimming. None of us can swim without practice, as none of us can read. The scary thing is that even the best of us can only swim about as well as the average dog. So pity us on the day we find a creature actually designed for reading.
There's an excellent book [1] that explores the neurological aspects of language. TLDR: language evolved to be efficient for our existing brain structures—our brains did not evolve to be good at language.
"Meant"? Nothing in your body or brain is "meant" for anything. There is no "meaning", or "intention", for starters. And the brain is nothing if not adaptable. If your brain is "meant" to be anything, it's versatile.
I think pretty much everything in your body is specialized and is "meant" for something. No matter how hard you try, you're not going to get your heart to replace your pancreas or kidneys. And you can't replace your lungs with brain tissue. Sure, doctors can transplant a toe to replace a thumb or a heart blood vessel with a vein from a leg with great success, but it's doing pretty much the same function, just in a different place.
As a whole, humans are quite adaptable to their environment, but specific body parts tend to be specialized.
There are parts of the brain meant for specific tasks. It isn't a homogeneous mass of neurons. The bit that is working the eyes atm was designed (via evolution) to work the eyes. As was the bit that takes the message from the eyes and ups the heart rate when a lion appears in your field of view. There is certainly some flexibility, but the basic task layout is a layout, not a random allocation.
You know exactly what he meant. You are using the word design in a different way than him.
There's absolutely a part of the brain that specializes processing visual information, just as there are organs throughout the rest of your body that specialize with other different tasks.
I disagree with Dawkins. If genes were the unit for evolution, we wouldn't exists. We would all just be bacteria spewing out copies of genes, with the planet buried in a pile of tiny protein chains. Genes are the servants of the species. They are a tool used by species to pass on traits, or even to acquire traits from other species. Genes are inert absent a species using them.
that suggests that once born, an individual could have all of their genes removed, and be perfectly fine, other than not being able to pass on traits to a new individual.
Yes. Genes and DNA are not the same thing. DNA is a means of recording and passing along genes. And alien organism that doesn't use our system of DNA/RNA could still possess genes. So it is theoretically possible to remove all manifestations of genes and have the organism continue to function.
This is not very far fetched. Much of our DNA is used for a short time during development and then effectively turns off for the rest of our life. Taking that DNA away might go unnoticed.
meaning is a nice convention to signify that something works well for some use case.
like, you didn't intend to type anything, it was just a series random processes that resulted in some text, but by convention, it's nice to say that you meant to write something.
Newborns can't swim in the sense that they stay afloat. A baby will drown if dropped in water.
They do have some reflexes related to swimming, in that they will hold their breath and work their feet, but those reflexes disappear with time and have to be re-learned.
It's fair to say that swimming is a learned practice.
>> ... will hold their breath and work their feet.
Imho that isn't related to swimming. That's them trying to keep their heads above water by standing up, hopefully in relatively shallow water. Even with drowning adults, they don't so much try to swim as try to grasp onto something.
Compare dogs. They have a swimming instinct dedicated to movement. Dogs don't tread. They move forwards. We flail around trying to climb out of the water. They are trying to get to shore. That has to be some sort of evolutionary relic speaking to very different ancestral environments.
Polar bears instincts accommodate both treading water and swimming within moments:
> Our brains evolved to what they are today long before reading was a thing.
You could be on a poster for "evolution stops at the neck".
Obviously, our brains did not evolve to what they are today long before reading was a thing, because that happened before today. There was no point at which brains stopped evolving.
>> There was no point at which brains stopped evolving.
Evolution operates on a different timescale. For all intents and purposes, our physical structure hasn't evolved since reading became widespread in the population perhaps a couple hundred years ago.
Charitably, reading was not "widespread in the population" at that time. sandworm101's comment shows a pretty appalling understanding of evolution -- the selective pressure for reading ability exists as soon as anyone can benefit from learning to read, not when everyone is required to try -- but a somewhat better understanding of history.
Very high literacy rates within endogamous subpopulations go back much farther than a couple hundred years, though.
In my case I think I avoid HN video links because I know in advance that they will ask me to commit an exact amount of time to it without knowing whether it will be worth it in the end. With text on the other hand, I can easily start to read an article and begin to skim it once I see that it isn't as interesting as I thought it'd be.
My recent forays into Kanji suggest there's more to visual processing of text than what we permit ourselvesto learn due to phonic constraints associatedwith language acquisition, but there's practically nothing for me to go on other than look into how the deaf process textual representations independent of the kinesthetic and proprioception encodings of semantic features.
Text certainly isn't dead, and I would rather think that we're liable to commit a grievous error by neglecting the primary source of civilization. Text also has added life in code and programming, which clearly shows it is no likely to suffer any kind of demise.
> My recent forays into Kanji suggest there's more to visual processing of text than what we permit ourselvesto learn due to phonic constraints associatedwith language acquisition
The phonic connection to reading is overrated IMHO and this is why I wrote of a hack of the visual system. Kanji/Hanzi are so easy to read because over the millennia the ones that are hard to recognize at speed have bene dropped or tuned -- and they have no connection to sound, as you say (well, in the Japanese case in particular there are some phonological puns, but I doubt you notice them at speed, even if you have the historical connection). In the latin alphabet I almost never recognize puns when reading (though I get them immediately if someone is reading aloud). And when I was learning German I struggled at first to read the compound words but now the morphological decomposition is automatic.
In fact I think the trend to teach kids English via "phonics" makes spelling harder; comment back if you want to discuss further
> In fact I think the trend to teach kids English via "phonics" makes spelling harder; comment back if you want to discuss further.
It took me a long time to realise the point of learning 'phonics' at school (they were called phonograms in Australia).
While I can see why writing and reading without speaking makes phonics look useless, for children, all of their language is initially communicated through sound. Putting a bunch of symbols in front of them and saying that it has meaning isn't going to help them - but showing that the symbols roughly correspond to sounds that they already know have meaning is a pretty important step.
This doesn't apply to all written languages - logographic systems obviously don't have a correspondence between sounds and written symbols - but for alphabetic systems and the like it's quite a good system.
Of course, English uses 26 letter to represent 44 or so sounds, so as far as learning to read and write via phonics goes, English is one of the worst examples there is.
> Of course, English uses 26 letter to represent 44 or so sounds, so as far as learning to read and write via phonics goes, English is one of the worst examples there is.
What you really want, for learning to read and write via phonics, is determinism -- you want someone to be able to write something if they know how it sounds, and to be able to read something if they see its written form. There's no need to have symbols and phonemes correspond one-to-one, and they generally don't even when people are devising their own orthography in a green field.
For example, using C for a generic consonant, we have the following regular spelling rules in English:
aC -- TRAP vowel
aCe -- FACE vowel
eC -- DRESS vowel
eCe -- FLEECE vowel
iC -- KIT vowel
iCe -- PRICE vowel
oC -- LOT vowel
oCe -- GOAT vowel
uC -- STRUT vowel
uCe -- GOOSE vowel
Voila, ten sounds in five symbols. The problem from a phonics perspective isn't that we don't have ten different vowel symbols for these, it's that we have other ways of writing the same vowels ("beat" is not written "bete") and other ways of reading words that appear to conform to these rules ("debris" does not rhyme with "priss", or even with "his").
So basically everybody should model their language after Finnish. I can supposedly pronounce almost any Finnish word or sentence near perfectly, and I don't understand a word of the language.
The rules for pronunciation is very directly linked to the spelling, with few exceptions.
> So basically everybody should model their language after Finnish.
Sure, as long as you assume the only goal is to validate a phonics approach to teaching reading. Some people appreciate that english words get the same spelling in Minnesota as they do in Mississippi.
English pronunciation <-> writing is so far from a mapping, it causes a lot of resource waste.
For foreigners like me that mostly use it in text, the biggest overhead is in speaking, for example I always mess up the words study and student, it's infuriating.
Even if there are dialects that pronounce the same word differently, you could still find a lot of common ground.
Finding that common ground would mean switching from our current system of somewhat-arbitrary spelling to a different but very similar system of mostly-arbitrary spelling. It imposes the same memorization burden on everyone and the benefit is slightly more predictable pronunciation within each of a set of officially-blessed dialects. That ground gets lost over time regardless; there is a reason predictable pronunciation is a feature of spelling systems that either (1) are new, or (2) have just undergone reform.
If your biggest problem lies in a circumstance you rarely encounter, arguably fixing it is not a priority.
> for example I always mess up the words study and student, it's infuriating
This is a funny example to use, since it fully conforms to the rules I described above -- study uses the STRUT vowel, and student uses the GOOSE vowel. It would be a better example for the complaint that we have more sounds than symbols.
Good points, but I disagree. Decoding and encoding becomes a lot harder, if vowels change depending on consonants coming after them, or something else even further down the line. (I'm not a linguist.)
It's like a config file specification that supports gotos.
There are, like in most other places. What's usually written is the so called "general language". You can also speak that in a formal setting.
It's like in English, if you say "y'all" and write "ladies and gentlemen", you understand that those might mean roughly the same thing but are different words. It's not a spelling issue.
This is an important but hard to articulate distinction. Ask more if it's unclear...
Yes, written English isn't a phonetic language like, say, Hindi. Or even German where spelling is changed to keep up with changes in pronunciation.
English is somewhat conservative with spelling, so a lot of words embody their roots in their written form. Teaching kids to spell via phonetics and a huge set of rules makes spelling (and comprehension of new words) harder not easier.
Of course you can take this conservatism to absurd lengths: in French spelling and pronunciation have become so divorced after only a few hundred years that spelling bees are prime time television!
> Yes, written English isn't a phonetic language like, say, Hindi.
It is still somewhat phonetic. If you ignore the vowels that have changed sound over time and the silent letters, you can still sound out a fair chunk of English words.
> Kanji/Hanzi are so easy to read because over the millennia the ones that are hard to recognize at speed have be[en] dropped or tuned
Um.... there are plenty of characters that would, at first glance, appear to be identical to each other. There are plenty more that people have difficulty identifying out-of-context, but not when they appear in context. Characters don't get dropped for being hard to recognize.
They are easier to read, assuming you already know them, because they encode significantly more information than a phonetically-based script does. That's a fairly straightforward example of more work up front allowing less work later, much as encoding wikipedia into a decompressor allows the compressed version of wikipedia to be very small.
Yes, Chinese people who went to school do mostly know the characters. And yes, given that knowledge characters are more helpful to the reader than a phonetic writing system is.
But memorizing a decent inventory of characters is a process of several years, and the boost in ease of understanding is under normal circumstances too small to notice. I notice that communicating in characters is easier because I'm not a native speaker of Chinese, and the semantic content the characters come with helps gloss over my lack of vocabulary and poor grammar. I can already understand English; I would get minimal help from extra semantic annotations to English text.
The total savings in terms of ease-of-reading in Chinese characters compared to an alphabet, summed over a person's entire life, will never pay back the effort it requires to learn them.
They're not all learnable. The common character 赢 is infamous -- among Chinese in China -- for being difficult to remember. And there are much worse ones.
Agree with this second part, it's structured like a tree, where a video is linear unless the scrubber has more detail. With text you can gather the shape and skim the start of topic sentences very quickly.
As well, you can quickly copy paste and remix text in a way we can't with video yet.
This comment is a personal anecdote. People respond to text in different ways. But they respond to visual motion more predictably. That has been my observation over the course of a year while experimenting with writing an electronic book. The book began as an Android app; and when shown to an audience the general response was one of disinterest. They'd read a few lines and stop, then comment on the photos. Maybe this was because the book was bad, but to me it seemed people did not want to read a lot of text. Perhaps the content was boring? I don't know. In an attempt to promote the work, I generated an auto-scrolling screencast of the book --- which resulted in (slightly) more interest. Consequently I've shifted to converting the book from an Android app to an autoscrolling mp4. It's a work in progress, and I'm prone to unrealistic optimism, but maybe this is a step toward a format for future written works [0].
Surprisingly, one app that is changing this paradigm for video is snapchat. Publishing content in a short series of clips that are skip-able with one tap is an enjoyable user experience.
Neither. Optimizing for user experience. Like it or not there's a new category of video content, short, casual videos. From the cooking shorts that are taking over facebook feeds to the the jealousy inducing short clips from my friends BBQ last night, this content category is growing.
Snapchat has the best UX for this type of content.
The simple idea of "tapping" to skip is the equivalent to the tab key when you're using excel. Life is better with it, and you miss it when you can't use it in other apps.
A lot of us here works with information for a living. Of course, we prefer the leaner, more information dense medium.
Facebook is not a platform to communicate interesting ideas succinctly. I apologize for not coming up a better way of saying this, but Facebook is catering for the not-so-sophisticated. The majority of users probably can't scan/process text very fast.
It's a great comparison. TV, in many ways is an obsolete medium, and yet it is still efficient and remains popular despite the advent of streaming and other media offering.
Yep. TV was revolutionary for advertisements and marketing. The passive viewing makes us more susceptible to them. TV ad revenue is still 10 times the amount for online ads world wide.
I have always assumed that all social nedia want to be the new TV.
I guess maybe I'm too old to understand (38) but to me, reading some text is simply way faster than watching someone read that text in a video... but they are saying the exact opposite.
Communication is often WAY WAY faster when delivered via text than via a video presentation, particularly because written words come at you at the pace your brain can accept them, as opposed to the static speed at which someone can speak them.
Also, writing is SO MUCH EASIER than creating video. Do you really think I would have bothered participating in this conversation if it meant opening up a camera and NLE and cutting together a video of my ugly mug yapping away, with the signature youtube jump cuts to remove the "umms" and "uhhss" and other pauses that you're not currently reading?
Cuz this reply wasn't a coherently delivered, smooth stream-of-conscious delivery. I've already gone back and rephrased several thoughts-- easy to do in text, a pain in the ass to do in video.
And I'm certainly not going to FIRST write this, then read it out loud, THEN edit it, and hope you sit back and watch. And the idea of text-to-video-- seems like adding an extra step.
Video is great, but its the wrong medium for quite a bit of communication.
I think that, in part, the article is misleading since I did not take away that Facebook thinks there's no purpose to text or that it will vanish entirely, and likely they share the same opinion as you.
The counterpart line to the "text is dead" idea is the following from Facebook in the article:
>“The best way to tell stories in this world, where so much information is coming at us, actually is video,” Mendelsohn said. “It conveys so much more information in a much quicker period. So actually the trend helps us to digest much more information.”
To me, this says less about "text is dead" and more "our users are choosing to share experiences with video, and they're doing it off-platform." Similarly, they continue with the following:
>"But Mendelsohn went further, suggesting that stats showed the written word becoming all but obsolete, replaced by moving images and speech."
I think 'text is dead' is Facebook's segue to bloviate about an upcoming set of features surrounding multimedia, which in turn is pretty much just a "stop uploading videos elsewhere" gambit. Facebook does do a pretty good job at making videos uploaded elsewhere work seamlessly with Facebook. I'd have to imagine that the next natural step is just to get those on Facebook in the first place.
So, I don't get the impression they want youtube-cut videos to replace the textual Facebook arguments; I think they're just trying to build up hype for FacebookVid or whatever they decided to call their next set of multimedia features.
Well produced video is magic. Think of a movie that was impactful to you -- done well, video can tell a story in an almost magical way.
The reality is that the average video is drivel and not nearly as good as a similar written piece. The FB is either living in a reality distortion field or thinking about high quality ad/infotainment content that produces $ for Facebook.
Most of us don't realise how difficult editing is. There's a camera in our phones, and uploading to Facebook, Youtube or Snapchat has never been easier, so now we're all film makers. It just that almost no one realise how hard their favourite podcast or youtube channel has worked on editing. Or how many times they redone the exact same bit, to get it absolutely perfect, and watchable.
It's easier and faster, to re-read a few sentences, edit the worst bit, re-read and post. There's not really a fast way of editing the worst parts of a video.
Of course, movies can be beautiful and even enjoyable because of their slowness sometimes - but that is completely different from the online experience, where everything moves extremely fast and there is always an overload of information, so to keep up with it, you want to be able to ingest it as quickly as possible.
Exceptions apply of course for long form writing pieces, where the pacing and the wording is as much a part of the content as the content itself.
I can't stand video content unless the visual component is absolutely critical to transmission of the idea that is being communicated. I'd take a podcast/audiobook (with playback speed control) over 99% of videos that are shared on HN and a gazillion other sites.
The "information density" to "bandwidth" ratio (is there a term for it?) is seldom justified for the majority of video content.
I cant stand videos for most information. By the time the video loads and the probably slow speaking individual goes over just the introduction of the information, I could have already read a more informative article/post.
Since I started playing all YouTube videos at 2x speed[0] I enjoy watching/listening to videos much more. Watching videos at 1x is just unbearable to me now. I wish FB added 2x playback too.
Interesting! I do the same with video lectures from Coursera. For example, Odersky's lectures may be interesting, but boy is he a slow speaker. I simply cannot stand his -- and to be fair, most -- lectures unless I play them at 2X speed.
And still, I'd rather read the PDF slides.
Video isn't a particularly good way of conveying formal information. Text with graphics is way better.
I never tried it at 2x speed. I will give it a try when I find an appropriate vid. Thanks to those of you who responded to my post, it gave me some good info.
This article borrows heavily from an article that Graydon Hoare (founder of the Rust programming language) posted a couple years ago - http://graydon.livejournal.com/196162.html
You probably didn't mean it this way, but your comment seems to suggest that plagiarism occurred. I think you meant to say simply that the two articles are similar in theme.
It doesn't seem like Kottke's style to plagarize, but it also seems extremely likely he read Graydon's post before writing this one. Even the phrases like "always bet on text" are the same.
It'd be great if we could extract subtitles from video and put into a nice text format that's easy to read so it's skimmable. Then when you get to an area of interest, you should be able to click the place where you're interested and a video will pop up and start from there. Then when you've heard what you wanted to hear you can minimize the video and skim the text for the next area of interest and so on.
This is a problem we (accessible.ai) have been working on in the past few months.
We're still tuning and improving but with a multi-modal approach of signal processing, speech recognition and text analysis we were able to come up with a pretty good MVP to solve this issue.
You can take a look at our small demo here: http://accessible.ai/nav
I imagine there could be an interesting means of moving the playhead along with your skimming, so when you highlight a block of text (as I do, habitually), the video would play through the selection and pause at the end. I'd love to use text as a video controller.
Yes, this is pretty much what I was picturing except without having to select the end, this way it doesn't just cut off when you were still interested in what was being said even though you might not have planned on watching past that particular point.
This is in fact exactly the approach that my lab has been working on for the last several years in developing a media player for language-learning applications (which has actually also been used for teaching linguistics and introductory chemistry, so clearly the pedagogical benefits generalize beyond just language learning).
Being able to switch between text-centric and video-centric views freely has been a goal of my (now-former, because he just retired) boss for a while (and by "a while" I mean he did his dissertation on interactive, text-augmented video technology with applications to education in the 70s), and we're not quite there yet, but we do have the ability to show a transcript that can be synchronized with the playing video (automatically scrolling and with highlighted text to show where the video is), or scrolled freely and searched through to select a specific part of the video to skip to.
You can see an implementation of the technology (including playing around with some of our editing tools) at http://ayamel.byu.edu
How much Facebook browsing is done discreetly in school, at work, in meetings, on public transport, when waiting for someone? Will video work in these situations? I doubt they'll be able to replace their current text with video.
It sounds more to me like they're looking at the bigger ad dollars YouTube is getting and want to absorb their market.
The only way for Facebook to grow now is to get out of the "friends and family" market and take over Twitter and YouTube's "celebrity/popular people" market. It seems like this could be a difficult pivot.
The 90 / 9 / 1 rule is finally taking hold on Facebook.
With only 1% of the users generating content, 9% simply liking/commenting, and 90% logging in to just watch.... FB is desperate to satiate the immediate gratification needs of 1B+ people.
One way to read it is "people are increasingly preferring video over text, so that's where Facebook is going". I think what it really means is that Facebook sees more ad money in video than in text, so that's where they are steering the ship.
This is anecdotal, but I've still never watched one of those auto-play videos you see at the top of news articles. It's just so much more efficient to just skim the text below and find the relevant information you were after.
This will force media companies to do something which they should have done a long time ago.
Think of all the videos you ignore on Forbes, WSJ, Bloomberg, etc. because you can't view them muted. Think of all the videos from Buzzfeed and others which aren't of such high caliber but are so easy to consume that you do.
This will force those with real content to publish that content in an accessible way. I'm fine with videos, especially muted ones, because if the current trends stay I think they'll be more useful to me and everyone else.
Text IS great. But somethings like a presidential speech or a short interview need the visual element. Some things don't need the visual part, but a media company can make it better than without it. The key will be to keeping it short because as others mention in the comments it's very difficult to skip around in videos for what you care about. Most of the videos I mentioned are already pretty short though, so I'm guessing that won't be much of an issue for them to adapt.
Consumption of media that expresses resonant emotions is to a degree validating.
However expressing and understanding myself and seeing myself emotionally and intellectually understood by peers is validation on another deeper level. The composition and writing of text has been shown to excite other areas of the brain than simple speech (there is a whole school on writing therapy).
There is always going to be a need for an immediate way to consuming and reacting. That market is served by twitter and snap-chat. Then there is the need for longer, carefully considered deeper thought. Thought where emotions have been deliberately moderated to provide breathing space for facts.
Video may provide more bits per second and via the eyes is more directly wired to our decision system. But the emotional space is already take by twitter and snapchat. The deliberation space is taken by text. It is not clear to me video will grow beyond a extended snapchat.
Now anyone can publish as much content as they want, however irrelevant, and that is becoming a problem: proliferation of irrelevant content (irrelevant from the perspective of the reader).
So I think the next challenge is to just be able keep content concise, relevant and affine to your interests. Twitter took a stab at that, but it's not there yet.
Having a machine to filter and produce summarized versions of whatever endless feed you are reading, as well as remembering seen entries (a bit like Snapchat) is the next frontier.
Another key issue is selective ignorance, biases and such. Only exploring stuff related to your interests can trap people within a detached state with respect to reality.
> Only exploring stuff related to your interests can trap people within a detached state with respect to reality.
That's something I've been casually interested in in the last few months, simply because I have, rather lately, come to understand that I won't ever be able to read all the books I want to read, or see the movies I want to see, etc.
However, it seems to me the "problem" or the situation is a little more complex than that. The information you consume will always be a subset of "reality", and how detached you are from "reality" based on what information you consume seems like a quantity that will be hard to measure.
For the sake of being somewhat contrarian here, I'm just going to repeat something I've mentioned a couple times: I think that contrary to popular belief, all attempts at giving people a more "balanced" view of reality with a balanced "information diet", all attempts at avoiding the "filter bubble" are completely misguided.
The value is precisely in creating bubbles that are as valuable as possible for individuals, by filtering, curating, optimizing the information they consume to maximize the utility they get from it. That possibility seems to me to be largely unexplored today in places where you would expect to see it (information aggregation platforms, recommender systems that are still quite primitive, etc.).
There are a lot of people who like communicating through image memes & other short soundbites - I am not one of them.
I value text. I like reading deeper insights from people much more than cheap flyby memes or time consuming videos. If communication regresses like that, I'll probably withdraw from using those features. It's simply what I don't want in a social network.
Yes! Exactly. My (optimistic) suspicion is the users will get bored of it and stop looking at the river of crap, forcing them to change directions again.
As FB has removed and reduced features, including messaging from their mobile web app, I've been using them ever less... I'm not sure they aren't alienating as many people as they're actively engaging, and in the effort to keep the new millenials, they're pushing everyone else away.
In the same vein I don't think it's as much capturing millennials as keeping up with them. It's impossible to predict every upcoming trend, but if they keep themselves nimble through acquisitions and trimmed product offerings they can ride the coattails of instagram/whatsapp type companies into eternity.
Yes, for almost everything online, I prefer text: programming tutorials, the news, discussions like this on Hacker News. Imagine if each reply here had to be an uploaded video of the member talking.
For some other things, I prefer a video: how to cook something, how to repair something, how to tie a tie, an interview with a person whom I admire. Even then it can depend on my mood, and if I'm in a hurry I am like, "Oh, just cut to the chase, or put it in a one-paragraph article."
I'm not sure that I want FB to die totally...I'd prefer they shrink and shrivel up, but not go away totally...I want the decentralized interweb platforms of the future to have something to look at...and for them to remember what they should not be doing. (Can you tell that I'm absolutely in favor of a non-centralized webternet world!?! ;-)
"stats showed the written word becoming all but obsolete, replaced by moving images and speech."
Obsolete would be a stretch however for many the web is all about consumption. Mobile devices cement this point. And videos are a very efficient way to consume information:
- Read the book VS watch the TED talk.
- Go to the recipe site VS watch this Tastemade video.
- Read the Foreign Affairs article on the complexities of the Syrian war VS Watch this cool graphic filled Vox video.
And even with the written word, text is becoming more terse:
- Read this article vs Read this set of tweets
But people will never stop writing so perhaps all Facebook is saying is that the written word will become less relevant to their business model as they slowly turn into something resembling Snapchat
I think that interesting topic is "will we create programs as text for a long time?". Projection IDE seems to stall.
Some time ago I was thinking about visual query language for databases (domain-specific) and composed this list of text advantages:
1. Version control systems (VSC) out of the box. Software developers have been using safe source code tracking for many decades. Since queries are the main tools for data analysts, they should be treated the same way, but the development of all VCS features in a custom query editor is not economically viable.
2. Portability. Text queries can be written even on a whiteboard and a notepad. One of the great advantages of text queries is that they are unambiguous: there are no hidden parts in a text query.
3. Detachable. Text queries can be run in different warehouses. They should not depend on identifiers, conditions, and environmental variables.
4. Fragmentation. An analyst can extract some feature from a query and partly pass it to his colleagues.
5. Embedding. Software developers easily can embed queries into autotests, side subsystems can embed query parts into their code or resources.
6. Specification. DSQL can be a part of a system’s applied programming interface (API) for third party systems if DSQL specification is precise enough.
They're probably thinking of memes and emojis as well. It can't be argued that well-structured text is a strong suit among individuals communicating with Facebook.
> Mendelsohn went further, suggesting that stats showed the written word becoming all but obsolete, replaced by moving images and speech. "The best way to tell stories in this world, where so much information is coming at us, actually is video," Mendelsohn said.
This is going to go down in history alongside the mythical "640K ought to be enough for anybody" and the guy who thought the internet was just a fad.
While video has the ability to communicate certain things more efficiently than text, it is far inferior in other ways.
For example, video is great at showing the physical relationship between car parts - what they look like, where they go - so if I'm trying to figure out how to get to that sixth spark plug on a 1990 Bronco II, I'm going to look for a video.
Video is also good at pacing the timing of emotional reactions. If it weren't, no one would watch movies.
If, on the other hand, I'm trying to learn or experience something complicated, like how to code in a new language, or an overview of the history of the idea of revolution, or any kind of theology, I'm going to read about it. I'm not going to watch some talking head give me far fewer words in the same amount of time, even if the video has some nice music and pans across a few pictures of cathedrals while the narrator speaks.
Words are the fundamental unit of thinking, and video is piss-poor at communicating words, especially when compared to writing.
I totally agree that text is "fundamental" indeed to our ability to communicate our mind-state, but text is not our mind state and it's a huge leap from "I can communicate with text" to "I'm thinking in text". You might as well assume video frames are fundamental units of thinking.
"Words," not "text." Illiterate people have words but can't read text. And some people "think in pictures" or "feelings" but that kind of thinking isn't the same as thinking in words.
It's not clear what Facebook is thinking here. Video is useful for showing what you did, but not useful for communicating what you want to do. Maybe this reflects that people don't plan trips on Facebook any more; they use Instagram for that. One could interpret this as Facebook abandoning communication in favor of being a collection of public scrapbooks.
I don't agree with the article. As others have already said here, text is random access and easy to process and retain information.
I am going to drift off topic: the future is AI that understands what we say, recognizes our facial expressions, and generally "gets us." While there are obvious potential downsides, the upsides involve getting notified of things in the order of most useful and entertaining first. AIs will use text, still photos, and videos to show us what we want to know and experience. This whole idea creeps me out a bit, but it is probably the future. At some point in time, effective computer to human neural I/O connectors will be invented, and the effect of civilization will be interesting. So, video -> direct neural implants.
The folks at Facebook are not stupid. This is likely setting the groundwork to ream more bandwidth through their Aquila project https://info.internet.org
More bandwidth means more money, which means convincing more of the public to invest more in Facebook.
As a consumer/dependent-based institution which benefits from increased control strives for growth and succeeds, eventually you reach a point where the most benefit to the institution can best be achieved using less literate followers/subjects.
I work in eLearning and we create a lot of visual content as its easy to convey ideas in video than through text.
The cost of video production is at least 50X or 100X more than text and hence, we take extra caution to make sure that it's precise and accurate. What is said in 1500 words is trimmed down to 250 words to create a video. It goes through multiple talents like motion graphics team, anchors etc before it hits the screen and hence it's interesting to watch. Text, caption etc are just there for SEO. Bandwidth is the only constrain, especially in developing nations.
And then there are low-quality mugshot videos, which takes less budget than what it takes to present the same content in text.
FB is missing three significant differences. 1 - Consuming video is time consuming. There is no quick scan for key words etc. If you're locked in on video X there's no scrolling on, etc. Your experience, in a way, stops. 2 - Video is passive. Reading takes engagement. Those will effect the brain very differently. 3 - Video is not conversational. It's traditional top down broadcasting.
Sure FB might become more video but that doesn't mean it's going to result in the same attachment to the product, at least for adults.
Text is an efficient medium to express something complex. But the average facebook user is not expressing something complex. He shares quick reactions, emotions, stuff that trigger anger or fun. Not things that requires deep analysis.
For that, video is perfect.
So in the context of Facebook, it makes sense. In the context of ads, it makes sense.
Yes, we don't want to believe it because it sounds like hell to people reading HN religiously, where text is kind, where people debate, where people don't use smileys, and where ideas get evaluated.
But that's not what Facebook is for. And that's not what the people on Facebook want.
> Doesn't it mean that most of these videos are watched with subtitles?
No, it means they're not actually watched at all. Facebook autoplays videos (without sound) when you scroll through your timeline. If you get distracted and stop scrolling and 10 seconds play, they count that as a "play".
Video is good for showing falling people (or naked). When I look for information - news, tutorials, knowledge - I avoid video like a plague. Three words: Low Information Density.
It just so happens that video works better on Facebook (and probably other social networks), where the stream of information is huge. People, most of them anyway, suck at describing things. Most of them can snap a picture of something nice, exciting, cute, whatever. Not everyone is writer, nor should one be to share some everyday thing.
Text has it's uses. It's just that other mediums usually tend to work better on Facebook.
First, FB assimilated Wikipedia (just text, few images). FB also assimilated IMDB.
Then, they discovered that most links aren't Wikipedia anymore but it's youtube. So they assimilate a video service so that they will be quoted when another hyped video comes up and not youtube again.
Aaand facebook will continue to assimilate. Google's AI features should be at their next aim.
I just read most of the comments, but I didn't read the article. I was much more interested in the comments.
Having said that, if these comments were an audiobook, or a word for word movie script, I'd probably only be through about 5 of them.
Words rule!
On the other hand, if a picture is worth 1,000 words, a movie must be worth billions! Unfortunately it takes a lot of study of a picture to get 1,000 word out of it. That's a lot of pausing.
Just today we had a "children illustrated guide to kubernetes" receiving lots of upvotes(243), and some comments saying it's a much better way to learn stuff.
So i'd say text isn't the ideal, it's just a matter of economics that we are surrounded by text all the time, and maybe facebook can shift that.
On a sidenote, i'm curious why aren't there aggregators for well illustrated content ?
To devils advocate, though, what if automatic transcripting of text from video actually worked reliably? You might then get many of the advantages of text in video form: ability to search, copy-paste, fast forward and backward while still seeing what is going on. You would still see the presenters ugly mouth flapping up and down, however, which might be thought a negative.
It's interesting to consider how painful a "video-only Wikipedia" would be to use. If the point is to distract, then video is certainly at an advantage. If the point is to communicate or inform, then certainly text is the winner.
I guess that explains FB's hope for a rise of video content.
I'm guessing this a pivot that actually is moving away from everyday user generated content as facebook already has become increasingly a news and image-macro aggregator/sharer. Why not video I suppose? I imagine forcing video advertisements pays significantly better.
I was first employee and lead engineer at a startup that was primarily focused on video, which eventually got aquired by a very well known video sharing platform. If there's one thing I learned in that 5 years, it's that I don't care much about video. I had every opportunity to find a way to care. I enjoyed creating the technologies that we created. I enjoyed managing the systems we built and meshed. I enjoyed inventing ways to store and retrieve Terabytes of short videos for thousands of people. I even enjoyed building a prototype video renderer in Javascript (which was eventually ported to C). But as far as consumption is concerned, I couldn't be bothered with the vast majority of it.
The applications that we built were an attempt to resolve some of this. We were building editing / curation tools to help improve video, and some of the people using our software created incredible things, that I absolutely loved.
I especially dislike the trend in the past (5?) years toward programming tutorials in video. Give me a written tutorial. Give me a blog post. Give me a well-commented repo, or at least a poorly commented one with a decent README file. When teaching anything involving a textual artform / profession, give me Anything but a visual / audial medium. I write and read code for a living, and otherwise I write and read about problems solved with code all day. When it comes to programming, video is a square peg in a knife fight.
That said, I have an enormous collection of TV shows and Movies, and I have a great deal of appreciation for the medium, in general. One of my close friends is an Editor in Hollywood and I have such an absolute respect for him and the creative sides of his industry. I love to see his work and hear about the intricacies therein. When edited and curated, video is splended. I can dive in and forget the world exists and appreciate nuance and symmetry of visuals, sounds, and ideas. And despite my feelings about programming videos, I know it's possible to learn from video, depending on the subject.
I don't want to watch videos of everyone I know doing every day things. I don't want to watch unedited, uncurated crap in real time. Every time a "Live" video link shows up on my FB notifications, I skip it. I don't want to see you live. If I did, I'd video chat with you, or I'd call you up to hang out. But if you want me to take some time out to watch your broadcast, then I expect some planning, editing, and and overall respect for my time. This is video, after all. It's all-consuming. I have to watch AND listen in real time, which means I'm not doing anything else. Asking that much of me requires respect.
Of course another benefit of text is that it's so easy to edit. I don't know if you've actually enjoyed reading this post, but I assure you the first version was much, much worse.
And if you just skimmed it and ended up here, at this sentence, well there it is: my favorite part about text over video.
Temporal disillusions caused by a feeling of being in control. A desire to rush to novel/radical claims with a cloak of pretentious knowledge. Sometimes its such a strain to wade through. And yes, go ahead, downvote.
This suggests that video lectures such as offered by coursera could be improved on by providing a transcript for every video lecture. Has this been done by any of the other online teaching institutions?
Am I the only one who stops reading an informative English article when the word "because" is used to begin a sentence? Maybe text does deserve to die.
Videos can be made to be extremely entertaining and take very little effort to consume. It makes sense that video will be increasingly important for Facebook.
I can read faster than most people talk. With text I can go back and re-read the bits I'm having trouble understanding and skim over the stuff I already know. With text the is never a problem with hard to understand accents or people who mumble or speak softly. In fact, thinking about it, text is almost always better to deal with than spoken language.
I sometimes have trouble conversing in crowded places if there's lot of other people having their conversations loudly. Not much trouble, though, but listening to the only one thread of discussion requires bit extra mental effort.
Then there are people who don't speak clearly, and you have to ask them to repeat what they said...
And all this in my native language. I find dealing with written forms of any foreign language I know much easier than the spoken language. (Both "understand" and "produce by myself".)
Well ... uh ... I think ... I think ... uh ... everyone can hear me? ... I'll wait till the guys in the back ... oh and the girls, too, right hahahahahah ... OK ... let's get started...
Sure. I know Facebook wouldn't put out videos like that but it seems 80% of all videos linked to do start out like that and that's the quality you're going to get from anyone worth listening to. Even the polished ones, though, blatter on about things I don't care about but I can't skim ahead in the video without worrying I'm skipping something I really do want to hear.
Thus, the advantage of text. To the point. Skimmable, both forward and backward with the ability to understand what you are skipping over.
Have you ever read transcripts from talks given? Don't you wish someone would have edited out all the garbage talk beforehand? And doesn't your mouse wheel finger hurt scrolling down the page, only to be told "to hear the rest of the video, click here".
Now let's talk about the weight of video files ....
At first, I thought 'Yeah me too, text is so much more efficient', but then I realized something. Maybe it's only me, but for learning more complex things video lectures work wonders for me, probably because they force me to slow down and process information calmly and in order; while with text, I tend to hastily jump all over the place, skipping the more boring bits and missing important things.
I completely agree there is a lot of garbage in a lot of video content, but if you can take advantage of the audio visual capacity you can get a lot. An example, Just watching a master craftsman do something can reveal a lot of tiny differences in technique that add up to a lot, but may not be written down explicitly.
Agreed, watching someone do something with his/her hands is (almost always) better than reading about it. But consider another scenario: a video of someone showing you how they type some code while talking about it. This sort of videos are unbearable to me, and I don't understand how some people can enjoy them. I'd rather read the code in text form, at my own pace.
My god, I hate coding videos. There is nothing more frustrating than a command-line Linux video. A.) I cannot copy/paste what you typed into your terminal into mine from a youtube video. Give a decent transcript with the steps enumerated.
I wonder if anyone has tried to build a ttyrec[0]/termrec player with synchronised audio?
Then you have the best of both worlds. Adding some sort of out-of-band overlays (like iTerm2/3 annotation maybe[2]) for
extra commentary would make it truly amazing.
..Looks like no, but in teh future plans of [1] at least.
I'm not sure how the production workflow would go - I guess you'd
- record your terminal session, perhaps with live audio recording.
- if tools existed (which they afaik don't really), being able to clean up your ttyrecs to remove typos, speed up slow typing etc, would be amazing)
- Maybe rerecord a commentary/narration audio on the edited visuals, and add any annotations.
- publish, and glory in your multimedia educational creation!
(As I continue to think about it, I'm tempted to try to build this. I wonder if it would get used?)
That's why podcasts are so much better on 2-2.4x speed with a silence skipper. I get an effective 3x speed and as long as I'm paying attention I still get every word. It sounds like gibberish to most newcomers but if you slowly speed up you don't even notice the increments.
Lectures may require a slower speed. I am talking about more general podcasts where there is more of a discussion going on. If the speaker is fast or if there is a wealth of numbers being recited you may need to slow it down. I don't have a single podcast that I run slower than 2x which yields an actual 2.6x with silence skipping.
Came here to comment on same. It depends. No amount of text can give you the feel of an event like a short video. On the other hand, imagine TV news as "read the entire NY Times" - it would take all night. Print has way more information, AND it's easy to skim.
That's unclear. The sheer bitrate of reading suggests that it might tap into some deep structures -- hacking some parts of the visual and speech systems, if you prefer.
I don't click on HN video links because I find video slow and frustrating way to learn almost anything. Text is so random access -- you can skip over boring bits re-read hard bits, luxuriate in the really wonderful bits...all of which is hard in video. And in fact because the visual channel is so complex, I find reading more multimedia than video -- it's hard to feel cold when watching someone march through the snow, though a well written book can make me shiver with cold, even on a summer day.