The rise of a visual internet?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This is one thing that drives me crazy about the Minecraft Modding community. Instead of properly documenting a mod on a Wiki someone will make an hour long YouTube video that takes forever to get to the point and misses a lot of the nuance. Not only does it take forever, but going back to find recipes or specific construction restrictions means scrubbing through the video looking for those 2 seconds worth of frames that had the relevant information. Even the old standards of the FTB wikis are now terribly out of date as everybody moved on to pure video.
That was replaced by an unskippable video system where you have to sit through a full hour of people not emailing their passwords to phishers and remembering to lock their screen when they walk away from their desk. It's miserable.
And i strongly agree. I hate to go searching for solutions to some computer problem only to find page after page of videos demonstrating step by step how to do something.
Reminds me of when i compared Cisco and Microsoft official training material on their products. The former was 99% text, as the interface to the routers were text based. The latter was a much larger tome, yet held mostly full page image of multiple choice dialogs and wizards with a small amount of descriptive text underneath.
Safe to say i learned more from the former than the latter...
When I scan docs I need to ctrl+f to find the terms I'm looking for to be quicker in knowing if these are the docs I'm looking for.
As I plan to teach some code using minecraft and modding this summer, the idea of having to watch a bunch video during the process frightens me. There must be a quick search function made somehow.
The internet promised to give everyone a voice and by moving away from text we would give up an important part of that ideal. There’s a place for audio and video sure, but I deeply hope there will also always be a place and an audience for writing
The competitive advantage from large capital resources is far greater with video than with text. As the internet turns into TV 2.0, the little people can crawl back under whatever rock they live under and the old order of media-democracy is restored.
As conspiracy theories go, it’s a particularly shabby one.
I very much prefer text, where I can skip boring or redundant parts, or radio where I can work in something else while I get updated on recent developments.
The immediate benefits of text are that text allows information to be stored, verified, indexed, and searched (assuming it was indexed correctly). It's only very recently that these same benefits have become available for audio and video. But they are still way behind text. For example, it's a lot easier to quote a snippet of text than to cut and paste a scene from a video sequence.
https://openuserjs.org/scripts/braindongle/CNN_remove_video/...
In the last 23 years, I've seen the Internet evolve from primarily a text based interface, which encouraged long form writing, and line-by-line-dissection of long form writing, to a medium that is primarily pictorial, and increasingly video based, where close reading of long form stuff is discouraged by code and design.
Postman himself declined even to look at the web in 1999, when I started reading his books, and he passed away in 2004. In 1999, I thought the Internet was part of the solution to the problem he was writing about. Today, the Internet is a bigger problem than television and the movies.
And the shift towards pictorial communication is rapidly approaching levels where it's a threat to civilization. Fark and Failblog are good amusements, but even the briefest look at 4chan will show you, we're in deep shit.
The thing is, the Internet isn't just the Internet.
Twitter can be criticized not for how well or how badly the company polices its users, but also in a medium-is-the-message way. Twitter is a cesspool of hate because the 140 character limit makes it useless for more than playground name calling.
Facebook is part of the problem not just because of Facebook's policies but because it's an interface that pushes blogging into microblogging.
Compare to Livejourbal, Wordpress, or dare I say it, Metafilter, all of which are better by design. (But don't get too smug. There's room for improvement. And it's still all stuff you're looking at with a tabbed browser, and it's always tempting to tab away.)
Or compare to Instapaper. I've removed Facebook and Twitter from my phone, and now when I;m out and about and being a phone zombie, I'm at least reading 1000-2000 word essays that I loaded onto the Instapaper app previously. It's made me a lot happier. But I am sad to report that I still have not regained the long form writing ability I had 15 years ago.
4chan, like life, is what you make of it.
If you want to regain your long form writing ability, you could try taking a Moleskine or small pad with you when you travel. You can use it as a way to help create content while you're out and about, as a replacement for your phone.
Additionally, if you're tech inclined, setting up a blog has become easier than ever before.
4chan is what I make of it.
But it's also what the rest of society makes of it.
That's why we're in deep shit.
The bubble I'm in discusses topics ranges so many arcane fields, but my addition to the bubble came at the cost of my childhood community loosing one of their more intelligent members. Facebook, Twitter, etc is just another layer on top of that.
My hope in the long run is that Gataca will address this problem and we'll get enough intelligent and unaggressive people to handle the exponential power increase that capable individuals have.
For now, stability at all costs please.
The Internet gives voice to the voiceless!
followed by:
Oh shit, they were voiceless for a reason.
The idea of curating the news didn't come about because of some big illuminati conspiracy, it's because loud tactless assholes tend to drown everybody else out given the opportunity. Call it the paradox of free speech.
Having your information controlled by someone is bad, but so is having no filter at all, and a middle ground is difficult to achieve and in some ways impossible.
Video is a supply- rather than demand-side phenomenon. Or rather, it's an interaction between publishers and advertisers rather than publishers and readers.
indeed, perhaps verbal/visual communication is just 'catching up' to text after millenia
I definitely write more. I probably write more on my phone than in total, pre-internet. Maybe I'm one of the Philistines.
That said, I read just as much as ever. Though I read far more non-fiction and news than I used to. I used to read more fiction and poetry. The easy access to content gives me too much to read, in fact!
My reading list grows daily. I simply can't keep up. And don't get me started on going down the Wiki-hole
In OP's terminology, I think we are the literate lowbrows.