Books promote deep, linear thinking. TV made us shallow and visual. Social media took it to the next level, turning us all into helpless Pavlovian mutts.
You can have the same message on all of those mediums, but only one is really effective.
TV has scripts. Those are written.
As far as depth, that really depends what you're reading/watching. I can find shallow books and deep TV. I can find both books and TV that get us to merely consume and also that get us to think, ask questions, talk about the content, and even dress up in costumes and go to conventions.
I'll give you TV being visual. So are graphic novels, though.
> That is not what "message vs the medium" means. This refers to how the medium affects how we think.
Marshall McLuhan (Mr. "the medium is the massage") talked about the amount of engagement demanded by different media in Understanding Media, making claims similar to yours. Common criticisms of that stance are that it's oversimplified and distorted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Media#Critiques_...
it's so different, you have a limited time (→ stress), digital device (→ eye strain), limited space
I often take my eyes off a book to ponder and process a passage. Who pauses the TV to process a scene? The pace is dictated for you. The images flicker forward and your brain needs to quickly discard previous information to catch up with the new one.
Books generally demand prolonged, fixed attention to a single organized subject matter or narrative, and do not interrupt the subject matter or narrative with random interjections of completely unrelated content. This, however, is precisely the sort of interjection TV performs through the means of the advertisement.
Social media in all its forms (twitter, facebook, instagram, et al) is essentially just TV if TV were only advertisements—a random collection of bite-sized, completely unrelated clips that bombard the viewer and gradually erode one's ability to devote continuous attention to a single subject matter. It's no wonder "influencers" are a dominant mode of advertising—they are the natural progression from TV ads. Social media already had the structure of the TV advertisement (a short burst of random information) all the big wigs had to do was convince influencers to start selling stuff directly.
Worse, if you watch TV today, you likely have access to social media on a smart phone. No one wants to watch TV ads so the temptation to fill that space with social media consumption is constant, which leads you to basically fill ad time with even less related or relevant info that has the same level of fragmentation as TV ads but even more extreme.
It's no wonder nobody can focus or remember anything when we've trained our brains to not only be used to but to actively expect random bursts of totally unrelated content at rapid rates. I've been getting worse and worse at being disciplined myself lately and at times quite literally feel like I've unintentionally given myself adhd.