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frog hop - always bet on text
graydon2: (Default) [personal profile] graydon2 wrote
on October 13th, 2014 at 12:34 pm
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always bet on text
I figured I should just post this somewhere so I can make future
reference to how I feel about the matter, anytime someone asks me
about such-and-such video, 3D, game or "dynamic" multimedia system.
Don't get me wrong, I like me some illustrations, photos, movies and
music.
But text wins by a mile. Text is everything. My thoughts on this are
quite absolute: text is the most powerful, useful, effective
communication technology ever, period.
[220px-The_]Text is the oldest and most stable communication
technology (assuming we treat speech/signing as natural phenomenon --
there are no human societies without it -- whereas textual capability
has to be transmitted, taught, acquired) and it's incredibly durable.
We can read texts from five thousand years ago, almost the moment
they started being produced. It's (literally) "rock solid" -- you can
readily inscribe it in granite that will likely outlast the human
species.
[13e30a48d3]Text is the most flexible communication technology.
Pictures may be worth a thousand words, when there's a picture to
match what you're trying to say. But let's hit the random button on
wikipedia and pick a sentence, see if you can draw a picture to
convey it, mm? Here:
"Human rights are moral principles or norms that describe certain
standards of human behaviour, and are regularly protected as
legal rights in national and international law."
Not a chance. Text can convey ideas with a precisely controlled level
of ambiguity and precision, implied context and elaborated content,
unmatched by anything else. It is not a coincidence that all of
literature and poetry, history and philosophy, mathematics, logic,
programming and engineering rely on textual encodings for their
ideas.
[220px-Rees] Text is the most efficient communication technology. By
orders of magnitude. This blog post is likely to take perhaps 5000
bytes of storage, and could compress down to maybe 2000; by
comparison the following 20-pixel-square image of the silhouette of a
tweeting bird takes 4000 bytes: [logo23x19]. At every step of
communication technology, textual encoding comes first, everything
else after. Because it's vastly cheaper on a symbol-by-symbol basis.
You have a working optical telegraph network running in 1790 in
France. You the better part of a century of electrical telegraphy,
trans-oceanic cables and everything, before anyone bothers with
trying to carry voice. You have decades of teleprinter and text-only
computer networking, mail and news, chat and publishing, editing and
diagnostics, before bandwidth gets cheap enough for images, voice and
video. You have pagers, SMS, WAP, USSD and blackberries before
iPhones. You have Teletext and BBSs, netnews and gopher before the
web. And today many of the best, and certainly the most efficient
parts of the web remain text-centric. I can download all of wikipedia
and carry it around on the average smartphone.
[220px-Gnus]
Text is the most socially useful communication technology. It works
well in 1:1, 1:N, and M:N modes. It can be indexed and searched
efficiently, even by hand. It can be translated. It can be produced
and consumed at variable speeds. It is asynchronous. It can be
compared, diffed, clustered, corrected, summarized and filtered
algorithmically. It permits multiparty editing. It permits branching
conversations, lurking, annotation, quoting, reviewing, summarizing,
structured responses, exegesis, even fan fic. The breadth, scale and
depth of ways people use text is unmatched by anything. There is no
equivalent in any other communication technology for the social,
communicative, cognitive and reflective complexity of a library full
of books or an internet full of postings. Nothing else comes close.
So this is my stance on text: always pick text first. As my old boss
might have said: always bet on text. If you can use text for
something, use it. It will very seldom let you down.
xpost: http://graydon.livejournal.com/196162.html
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From: [personal profile] hivehand
Date: 2015-05-13 05:15 am (UTC)
All of the above, plus... (Link)
Everything you say is true; even so, you leave out one point that's
crucially important, at least to me: text is also the most efficient
technology when it comes to bridging that last gap between the
computer and the human mind. Send me a link to a news story that
turns out to be a video, or an audio file, and I'll close it
unconsumed: I haven't got that kind of time. Send me a transcript:
I'll finish reading in half the time it would take me to passively
sit there while it played, and I'll more clearly remember it.
(Reply)
(no subject) - (Anonymous) Expand
[684470] From: [personal profile] graydon2
Date: 2015-09-28 05:16 am (UTC)
(Link)
I disagree. Even assuming you mean efficiency-of-human time (my use
of "efficiency" related to coding-efficiency, but whatever): you're
using the concepts of efficiency in only 1:1 and realtime forms; but
I can scan and summarize and search text in ways I can't with a/v,
and these all make my time as a human better-spent. I consume far
more text in a day from sources who aren't here and with whom I'm not
having a 1:1 conversation with. And I produce more text for people
who will come later, who similarly need access to it without using my
time or wanting to plod through my production.
Same with measures of "social utility". You're focused on 1:1,
synchronous social interactions. As soon as you have 10 people trying
to talk at once (or god help you, 1000 as in some IRC channels or
mailing lists) and/or any significant delay between producer and
consumer, you're absolutely sunk with a/v. I'll admit there exist
cases where an a/v interaction is a bit quicker and more nimble than
a textual one, and there are cases where (say) nuance or negotiation
requires emotional tone that's harder to convey in text; but in
aggregate, summed across all the millions of technologically-mediated
social interactions, I believe text is massively ahead of all its
competitors.
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread) (Expand)
(no subject) - (Anonymous) Expand
[684470] From: [personal profile] graydon2
Date: 2015-09-28 02:43 pm (UTC)
(Link)
Tumblr users communicate their emotions, primarily for social bonding
and aesthetic enjoyment rather than idea-communication, and and do so
via collage and resharing. And yes, it does tend to work across
languages, total advantage to images there. I'm not saying images
have no advantages (see second sentence of original post).
I love tumblr, but the precision and ability to articulate new ideas
you yourself want to convey via such an image-share is significantly
lower than text. If you wanted to have the conversation you're having
here with me via tumblr-image, you couldn't. If you don't have an
image to reshare and you don't have something directly in front of
you to photograph, images are extremely laborious to compose. Indeed,
when people want to put an exact idea into an image, they overlay
rendered text on it via catmacro or screencap subtitle or whatever.
The images alone don't say what needs saying.
All the annoying arguments on facebook are via text. Buzzfeed
listicles are via text. I'm not talking some sort of highbrow
position of the literati. SMS and chat services are by far the
highest share of screentime on most mobiles. People love photographs
of things immediately in front of them, of course -- far more
emotional salience and far higher bandwidth than a text -- but most
things you need to say, you don't have a photo for and can't say via
imagery.
Anyway we're going around in circles and I do not have a blog in
order to be heckled by strangers. I'm kinda tired of restating my
thesis. You disagree. I get it. Go enjoy image-land. I do not post to
this blog with the intention of entertaining Hacker News Debate Club
and I frequently disable comments or friend-lock posts in order to
avoid this sort of nonsense. I'm not interested in further
discussion.
(Reply) (Parent)
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