The Age of Reading Is Over - The Atlantic

[orthoclad]

11. YES, indeed!

We are turning into screen people, staring at videos all day. I posted something the other day asking if we were going post-literate.

Several people who post here prolifically post NOTHING but videos, not one line of descriptive text. One post said fifty minutes for a video. Who the hell has a life where you can spend 50 minutes staring at a phone?

Video is inimical in what it does to the brain. Like tv, it induces a semi-hypnotic state of receptive suggestableness. Reading text exercises the brain; it's an active medium.

There are a few occasions where video or visual is appropriate. The picture of the napalm girl in the Vietnam war was worth many thousand words. But in general, video is information-poor. The vast majority of the bits and pixels are just noise, no information content, just a LOT of data. In general, I can get the gist of a piece of text in a matter of seconds, compared to 5 to 10 minutes of Hi-my-name-is-George-and-I'm-here-to-tell-you... blather.

I remember an sf novel from the 50s with a theme of post-literate society. In that book it was a good thing, signalling a change of consciousness, a gestalt-type, nonlinear way of perceiving the world. In real life, video is more like Ozzie and Harriet.

Text is information. Video is noise.