Whyyyyyyyyy?!
Seriously I'm curious, what happened? Do intellectuals (whatever that means) really not prefer reading any more?
A desire for Podcasts/audiobooks I can understand, as someone who occasionally has to drive places, but video?
I find it easier to concentrate for an hour or two on a video than a book. I'm probably slightly dyslexic or something. At university I made sure I never missed a lecture but hardly ever read a book. I did above averagely well.
This is a disadvantage though. I have friends who can read books in a couple of hours and absorb the content. I'd have to sit through more hours of video to get the same content, even watching the videos at 2x speed.
Wild speculation: being intellectual used to require being good at book comprehension. Maybe only 10% of the population are good at that. Maybe some of the remaining 90% are still clever. If so, video content could allow those book-comprehension-limited people to become intellectual. That'd be nice.
That is because video does not requires you to concentrate. Imagine a book which is required to be read in 1x or 1.25x or 1.5x or 2x only. Pretty impossible to read, isn't it? You know, some paragraphs may require several hours to be read. Video just doesn't support to be consumed at different speeds per paragraph.
My English is not enough eloquent yet, so I share my anecdotal evidence. Some sentences in books is not understandable if reading only once, and we usually do not go to next one if the previous has been not understood. It is OK to read a sentence 5 times and to read another 2 places in previous parts of a book in order to understand that sentence. Going to a special place from previous parts of lecture might be a pain because of needness to re-listen some extra materials.
While watching video it is too easy to skip that hard sentences especially if professor is too charismatic to let us feel the needness to stop his lecture for a moment in order to think. And it is too hard to re-listen only the part is needed for re-listening, like when you can not parse one word (0.5 seconds long), so you press backwards and you realize that you need to relisten extra 4.5 seconds each re-reading.
That circumstances leads us to just keep listening while the pyramid of non-understanding actually grows on.
[1] Admittedly crap 2D car sim https://github.com/abainbridge/car_sim
I suspect this is at the root of disagreements about 'visual learners', etc.
And video is a more addictive medium.
> And video is a more addictive medium.
IMHO it is not about video but about smartphones. They are too optimized for consuming ads instead of sciences. For example, it is way more handy to watch videos while constantly being interrupted by social networks than to silent reading if you are already taking a smartphone in your hands.
I think videos are the best way to consume content in ~20 minutes.
I think that good videos add something on top of the raw script. Visuals, body language, sound effects and music, timing,... That's just for the kinds of videos where the bulk of information is in the script, which excludes things like videos about music production or the like.
Maybe if you spend 20 minutes reading a book, there's going to be a lot of interleaved information: kind of repetition, but with change, so that you really get a good feeling for the core ideas.
A video that would take the same amount of time to watch might not have the same density of language (and I'm not even sure what the ratio would be: i don't think it's 10X, as you implied)--well, maybe it achieves a similar effect, that of increasing comprehension, not by repetition or extra examples, but by the non-linguistic information I listed above.
The 2 minute article just doesn't have the same sticking power.
For strictly intellectual skills I find short introductory lectures on YouTube a great way to survey a topic. For a topic I know nothing about I find YT great place to find which direction is most interesting to pursue.
And finally, I often go to YouTube for something specific, like say researching a camera, and as long as I’m already there I catch a few short videos on this or that idea.
I still read magazines (online because of where I live) and a few blogs and listen to maybe half a dozen podcasts regularly, but unless you show up on one of them, you’re much more likely to cross my radar on YouTube.
+1 for writing and also doing some YT videos, also +1 for interviews, and if you have time and a pleasant voice the. consider doing a podcast.