Right... and instead of writing down the main point, the author isn't doing any kind of favor to the internet by making his/her stand over the course of a 69 minutes long podcast. Nice.
I started playing skyrim for the first time. When I have to search online for help it's so refreshing to get helpful content. No videos and minimal blogspam. Even just forum posts with helpful info.
most books don't require that much nuance, nor "the experience" of reading it
That aside, I’m still not convinced I know what you mean when you say time is not fungible. I think what you might mean is that time is precious and not to be wasted, but I’m not sure what this has to do with fungibility.
Regardless, I think I agree with your main point which is that most written works are low-content repetitive trash. Let’s stipulate that I’m only talking about buying and reading rich, innovative, and/or elucidating works of nonfiction. They all require a great deal of nuance, I assure you.
I was pointed to this phenomenon by the book Suburban Nation thirty years ago, and it continues to explain so much.
Not much has changed over the years - I still use rc.conf and pf.conf to configure my system. Things are still where I expect them to be.
XFCE is still the same, thunderbird hasn't changed much. Vim is exactly how it was. And the initial learning curve wasn't even that steep.
Meanwhile, Windows is just getting worse and worse and worse for each year. So in that case, I am paying both with my time wasted and with money(though someone elses).
You can spend a year and some change writing a book and it will die in obscurity, then some youtuber will read your book word for word into a camera in a weekend and make millions of dollars. A text article that takes 20 minutes to read will make all of $30 in ad revenue. A podcast episode will have a $300 sponsor spot at the front and back. A youtube video can make tens of thousands of dollars in that runtime. If you publish to a paywalled site, hold on, dont you know that information needs to be free? Here's an archive link.
You can browse a website for some tech product and learn absolutely nothing about it. They aren't capable of describing it in text, and most of their customers aren't able to read anyways. Contact us so we can read the written script at you.
I'm in IT consulting.... every new batch of noobs has someone who tries to do everything in chat and email. If you start booking meetings and making phone calls, you will be three times as productive. Your tasks will not be [pending customer] EVER, all your deadlines will be clean, the clients will praise your communications, and you'll get promoted at your year 1 review instead of year 2.
support your favorite writers, friends.
Humans have only been reading and writing for about 6000 years (and mass literacy has only existed for a few hundred years).
Compare that to a 200k+ year evolutionary history of verbal and face-to-face communication.
So maybe it's understandable if most people prefer the latter.
EDIT: has anyone looked into doing something like this?
I actually don't think there is a technology constraint at play. Kindles can already TTS anything and good AI narration is just a step up from that. 'reading avatars' will surely appear, but for now the sellers benefit from audiobooks being a separate product category.
I think long form essays are better done as a video, actually.
If I'm going to absorb 4 hours of content, then 4 hours is a lot of time to dedicate. A video playing while I do the laundry is a lot more doable than trying to read at the same time.
And if you're doing some sort of in-deep analysis, then a video allows for very seamless diagrams, screenshots, and video excerpts.
Different mediums have different tradeoffs. Not everything is best as a webpage.
Yeah, but the difference is that it takes me 15 minutes tops to read the essay, versus 4 hours for that video. Give me text any day of the week - I don't want to spend hours listening to someone talk when I can absorb the same communication 10x faster in text form.
I would agree that reading is better for things that I know I will want to read. But there is a finite amount of attention in a human lifespan. There are many things I know I wouldn't want to spend my reading time on, but which I would happily throw on at times when reading would be impossible, like doing chores, exercising, or driving. Audio makes it possible to learn more things in the same amount of time.
Generally anything over 700 WPM is considered skimming, not reading. There's very little evidence that anyone can read above 1000 WPM without severe loss of comprehension, except in the top percentiles of competitive speed readers. Even they are only achieving 50-60% comprehension.
Says a ton about the infantilization of adults.
But I don't take away any merit to the thesis, she might still be right even the case was not ideally presented.