[HN Gopher] Text Is King
___________________________________________________________________
Text Is King
Author : zdw
Score : 154 points
Date : 2026-01-20 21:57 UTC (6 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.experimental-history.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.experimental-history.com)
| Shellban wrote:
| Another advantage of text over the long-term: it is accessible
| for discussion.
|
| Let us say that you want to analyze, say, drinking culture in
| Ireland. You could write documentary on it, or do a fictional
| character study. However, those require actors, camera equipment,
| editing tools and time, and it generally extremely expensive and
| time consuming. A quick TikTok video may be a bit cheaper than a
| full-scale film, but still needs some of that equipment and
| cinematography skills.
|
| Music is not much better. You need skills in singing, translating
| ideas of rhythmic lyrics, as well as supplies for instruments.
|
| Writing, however, is simple. At minimum, all you need is paper
| and skill in articulating ideas. Almost anyone worthy to
| rationally ponder a topic already has the skills to put it to
| paper (assuming that they have gone through a proper First-World
| education and know reading and writing).
|
| Text is also one of the easiest to share. A picture is worth a
| thousand words, but that poses problems in sending all that
| information. Plain text, however (or even most rich-text formats)
| can be transferred to anyone over almost any protocol, even
| rudimentary ones such as word-of-mouth. Ideas shared through text
| can be sent at an unrivaled pace.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| This is why I think all video content should have auto
| generated transcripts for various reasons; subtitles, auto
| translations, but more importantly index- and searchability.
|
| You can't expect anyone to view 20 million videos a day to find
| trends in current day video discourse. In theory machines could
| do it, but it costs a fortune. But 20 million text transcripts?
| That's doable on someone's local machine.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >subtitles, auto translations, but more importantly index-
| and searchability.
|
| Google has this all for themselves, but they don't seem to
| give anyone else the ability to access the data easily so the
| last two points are a yes for them and a no for you.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Talk is even easier. You just need to press record. Or not even
| that, go and talk with people or scream at people.
|
| Talking has always been superior to text, and most of the
| problems of industrialized society is that the majority of
| people have become psychotic brained by thinking that the
| written word is higher than the spoken word. The spoken word is
| of course superior, and has always been.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I would do more video, but video editing is _really difficult_.
|
| I think that today's video influencers have gotten really good at
| "one take and done" recording.
|
| I couldn't do that. I'm way too much of a perfectionist. I always
| edit my text, and I've been writing all my life. I don't think
| that I've _ever_ written something perfectly, the first time
| (including HN comments. I tend to go back and edit for
| correctness and clarity).
|
| A couple of weeks ago, I was interviewed for a podcast. The
| process was fascinating, and the woman that did it, obviously
| does a great deal of editing and refinement. I don't know if I
| have that much patience.
| kalterdev wrote:
| No prominent writer has ever said that writing came easy to
| them. I think it's not wrong to feel this way.
| conductr wrote:
| There's a lot of iterative script writing that goes into "one
| take" videos. I think they often appear to be one takes and
| that's the polish or perfectionism you're seeing.
|
| I mean, some of them are just rambling on and going more Vlog
| stuff. But even then they've likely already decided an agenda
| of discussion items and thoughts on them prior to just randomly
| going unfiltered.
|
| Although idk, our algorithms of content could be completely
| different and you're truly seeing something else.
|
| Even short form video is a lot of work to be good at it and
| build a following unless there's something else at play
| (charismatic, sex appeal, etc).
| JamesTRexx wrote:
| Text is my favourite minimalistic medium. I keep a minimum eye on
| regular news through teletext and tech news via Slashdot and here
| because there are barely any distractions from the core content.
|
| It's also very flexible in that I can immediately return to a
| previous sentence without needing intermediate steps like
| rewinding a video or audio format. I can copy parts into another
| document for reasons. It's easier to search. This is also what
| makes learning from a book so much better than video (besides not
| needing batteries for it).
| volemo wrote:
| But a book is neither searchable, nor easily copyable. :/
| mold_aid wrote:
| I guess the latter depends on your standards for "ease" and
| the former your ability to find an "index"
| squigz wrote:
| Ebooks are
| t-3 wrote:
| OCR exists, and the vast majority of new books are developed
| on computers and are available in a searchable and copyable
| format. Ebook software for research and collaboration is not
| as developed as software purely for linear reading, but
| there's no huge blockers.
| volemo wrote:
| GP is obviously talking about regular paper books:
|
| > besides not needing batteries for it
| JamesTRexx wrote:
| Actually, analogue and digital versions. Both have their
| pros and cons.
| taeric wrote:
| I would focus a little differently from the folks talking
| about the technological copies that are possible. Copying
| people and things is just somewhat natural for people to do.
| And yes, you can somewhat copy a performance that you see.
|
| But that is far far harder to judge your progress and ability
| on compared to copying a text over and seeing if you can keep
| the same structure and rhythm. The proliferation of cameras
| have changed this some, of course. But it used to be a thing
| that you would try and rewrite from memory some poems that
| you were studying for school.
|
| Oddly, what is really killing this, I think, is the new idea
| that so much in life should be permanent. Notebooks are where
| you think outloud and you should expect most of your thoughts
| to be transient and not worry about holding on to them.
| Computers completely break that with people wanting a
| permanent and indexed collection of all of their thoughts.
| mghackerlady wrote:
| How's slashdot nowadays? It just seems like hacker news if it
| was mirrored on an ad infested site that'll prolly give you
| malware
| JamesTRexx wrote:
| Someone else also mentioned advertising, yet even when I
| disable uBlock and allow everything with eMatrix (on Pale
| Moon), I see nothing of that. Maybe it's the excellent karma
| I have there.
| boredemployee wrote:
| >> Books are disappearing from our culture, and so are our
| capacities for complex and rational thought.
|
| are they? maybe it's a cultural thing or maybe the author's
| perspective is from 1st world countries. here where I live ppl
| can't stand reading books on digital devices (not counting tech
| bros in my N)
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It's just the introduction that highlights the "reading is
| doomed!" narrative, the rest of the article says it's not
| actually so bad.
| mghackerlady wrote:
| It's not people moving to ebooks, the amount of people I know
| personally who are proud of never having read a book for
| pleasure or not having done so in a very long time is absurd.
| Today's high schoolers struggle to read at a 6th grade level,
| and don't see that as an issue since literacy is seen in a
| similar way to vinyl records (something archaic and pointless
| that a rare few still enjoy but has largely been replaced by
| modern technology)
| n4r9 wrote:
| Text is searchable, skippable, scrollable, compact,
| transmissible, and accessible in a way that audio and video have
| never managed to be.
| kalterdev wrote:
| It's also runnable (scripts), clickable (urls), and context-
| dependent, which makes it a nice UI.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Text is searchable, skippable, scrollable, compact,
| transmissible, and accessible in a way that audio and video
| have never managed to be.
|
| That's just a very long way of saying it's difficult to
| monetise; it's why audio and video are preferred by producers
| of content.
|
| Few people are interested in disseminating an idea, a concept,
| anything... they are interested in levelling up their fame and
| followers. Text is typically no good for that.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Video keeps blowing up because people want to connect with
| humans, and life is making that harder than it needs to be,
| so people are settling for these weird parasocial echo
| chambers. With the rise of AI, all text is suspect, and
| authenticity is king.
| 6031769 wrote:
| With the rise of AI, all audio, images and video is now
| also suspect.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| True, but it's a lot harder to sneak those things than
| text. I've seen convincing Yanis Varifakis and Neil
| DeGrasse Tyson fakes, but even those don't survive any
| scrutiny. I'm sure that will change, and people will find
| new ways to signal authenticity in videos (leaving in
| fuckups is already in style).
| eviks wrote:
| Same thing if you swap "text" and "video". That's the point of
| different media - they differ along those dimensions. For
| example, "a picture is worth a thousand words" means that for
| some information it will be less compact to describe all the
| details of a video with words
| sham1 wrote:
| While this is our course a good point, one extremely good
| part about text is that unless there given text is quite
| literally just plain text data, it's a lot easier to embed
| things like videos, pictures, audio, etc. into a textual
| medium especially when compared the other way around -- that
| is the fact that text in videos and pictures and so on tends
| to be quite limited when compared with the kind of "rich
| text" with the more audiovisual content added between blocks
| of text.
|
| So one can use the thousand words of pictures while most
| content is textual, whereas the other way is significantly
| worse, since it of course lacks all the searchability et al.
| eviks wrote:
| You're discussing a mixed content document format, the
| original point was about some mythical benefits of text,
| explicitly vs video, which removes all the embeds from your
| document
| n4r9 wrote:
| Obviously there are some pieces of information that can be
| conveyed better with a picture or diagram - network
| connections, block graphs, etc. But as a general rule text is
| far more efficient for knowledge transfer.
|
| If I have a text file and an audio file of the Great Gatsby,
| and I want do any of the following, then I'm going to use the
| text file:
|
| * Find a particular quote
|
| * Determine the number of times the word "Gatsby" is used
|
| * Go back a few pages to remember exactly how
| something/someone was described
|
| * Intermittently stop and compare with a supplementary file
| and/or write notes
|
| * Find exactly where I was just before I fell asleep
|
| * Get through it in 3 hours without rushing or missing bits
|
| * Store it on a portable device along with thousands of other
| books
| eviks wrote:
| There is no such general rule, and humanity has always used
| various media, and for every biased test you come up with
| (frequency of a word in a text) you can just as well come
| up with a test that benefits the other medium (frequency of
| some sound in the audio book)
|
| * Go back a few pages to remember exactly how
| something/someone was described
|
| Or you don't forget how someone looks because a visual
| illustration is easier to remember
|
| * Find exactly where I was just before I fell asleep
|
| You can't, the book closed when you fell asleep and you
| forgot the bookmark . But when the phone fell it
| disconnected your headphones which stopped the playback.
| reb wrote:
| Amen. It's one real "downside" in this day and age is that it
| requires fairly undivided attention to be used... that aside,
| it's without question my favorite way to interact with
| information.
|
| On that note, a big thank you to whoever added "read this page"
| to Safari on iOS! Being able to turn long form articles into
| ad-hoc podcasts has been a game changer for me.
| gruturo wrote:
| It also fits in a handful of bytes or kilobytes what would take
| half a gigabyte to communicate in a video - sometimes making
| the difference if you have limited bandwidth or a cap on
| monthly traffic.
|
| It's also ridiculously easy to cache (download a book in 9
| seconds, board a transoceanic flight - no problem)
|
| It also doesn't require the right sound and lighting conditions
| to see and understand a video (either those conditions, or good
| noise cancelling headphones - and now you're unaware of your
| surroundings)
|
| It's also the only viable option on insanely low power devices
| which get months of battery life per charge.
|
| It's also something you can read at an incredibly speedy pace
| if you are good at it and practice - though occasionally a
| decent audio/video player will be of use with this.
|
| It's also something you can fall asleep while consuming, and
| tomorrow you won't have much trouble finding exactly where you
| left off.
|
| I could continue..
| storystarling wrote:
| It's also the only medium where semantic reasoning and
| indexing at scale makes financial sense. I can run RAG over
| millions of text rows in Postgres for pennies, but the
| compute costs to process and embed video content are still
| prohibitive if you care about margins.
| BinaryIgor wrote:
| It also the most _portable_ - no codecs, no formats and
| standards; most English texts are just ASCII :)
| kalleboo wrote:
| The reason video is winning is because you can make a living on
| video advertising. It's not really possible in this day to make a
| living on writing, outside of specific niches. So people who are
| good at writing use that skill to make video scripts, not blogs
| or books.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Yup; I'd make the claim (as an internet commenter, not an
| expert) that audio / video is more aimed at passive
| entertainment, whereas reading and more importantly deep
| comprehension etc takes more effort and time, and it's harder
| to monetize.
|
| Not impossible, mind - the author posted this on Substack which
| is a way that one can monetize writing (blogpost style articles
| anyway).
| pixl97 wrote:
| Just about anyone being able to make money from writing also
| seems like a somewhat modern aberration.
|
| Pre-printing press typically only the very wealthy had access
| to paper and ink, the process of copying a book was a huge
| undertaking.
|
| Printing press opened things up, but paper was still rather
| expensive for quite some time. It wasn't until the 1900s that
| the book-splosion really took off.
|
| With the take off of cheap paper products we switched from
| what you could write, to what could you get published and
| mass printed as the main gatekeeper. This paradigm stood for
| around 100 years.
|
| With the rapid growth of both the internet and digital
| technology as a whole, anyone could write and 'publish
| online'. For a time this was lucrative as content was king
| and brought eyeballs. The internet was still slow enough for
| most that other forms of high bandwidth content were still
| luxury goods.
|
| By 2010 the internet and smartphones were to the place that
| non-text media was where all the money was going. With the
| rise of the influencer a company could give a moderate amount
| of advertising dollars to an individual and get an oversized
| return on it. At the same time social media was gating off
| large amounts of text and people from the internet at large.
| Add to this the copying of text content in order to steal
| advertising dollars and clicks (think stack overflow copies
| and the like). Google and the other large social media
| companies with the advertising platforms greatly reduced the
| payout for text content and things moved to multi-media/video
| for the advertising dollar. The latest rage is shorts to keep
| ones ADHD addled mind locked to the screen for hours without
| moving.
|
| With LLMs crapping out text who knows what our future of
| earning money with words looks like. Also, it's likely that
| AI driving virtual world will grab the attention of the
| masses, much like a personalized video game with the ability
| to be as addictive as our most dangerous drugs.
| wbl wrote:
| The printing press immediately brought about broadsheets
| handbills and dozens of other mass publication formats.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Audio is also great for busy people. Doing chores, driving,
| shopping, at the gym, even at work depending on your job. A
| lot of video content is mostly just audio anyway with either
| a person's face or filler images anyway. Audio and audio-
| heavy video is a way to get information or entertainment if
| you don't feel like you have the time to sit down and read.
| wosined wrote:
| As I counter claim to the one that today is more recorded than
| ever, one could suggest that these recordings are not guaranteed
| to last long, not even the span of one lifetime.
| yomismoaqui wrote:
| In an LLM world text will also be is king.
|
| Sure, LLMs can understand images and video, but when you make
| your program spit debug text you make it easier and faster for
| Claude Code to iterate on it and fix any problems.
|
| See how much value does a text UI program like Claude Code
| provide, it really doesn't need anything else than cannot be done
| in a terminal.
| xnorswap wrote:
| > it really doesn't need anything else than cannot be done in a
| terminal
|
| I strongly disagree with this.
|
| Claude-code would be super-powered if it had a better grasp of
| running processes _without logging output_. Imagine if it could
| somehow directly trace running programs, spotting exceptions
| and gauging performance in real-time.
|
| It would be super-powered if it could actually navigate around
| a code-base and refactor through language servers without
| having to edit files through search & replace.
|
| Imagine if instead of code, the program was first compiled to
| an Abstract Syntax Tree and claude worked directly on that AST
| instead of code.
|
| Never a misplaced semi-colon* or forgotten import directive.
|
| It needs a fundamentally different model to an LLM to operate
| it, but I'm convinced that thinking that Text is the endgame is
| a form of blub.
|
| It's where we are now, and it's working very well, but it
| shouldn't be considered the long term goal. We can do better.
|
| * To be fair, this one hasn't been an issue for a while now.
| furyofantares wrote:
| For small games I work on I make sure claude (well, codex
| cli) can produce screenshots of whatever screen it's working
| on and evaluate them. It has some instructions on using codex
| exec (claude -p) to use a clean instance for evaluation, so
| it can pass a screenshot and description of expectation and
| get a pass/fail and description of the failure. The main
| agent can also just view the image but for things with a
| clear pass/fail I prefer it invoke a clean context.
| smartmic wrote:
| Not all reading is the same. In other words, I wish this article
| had differentiated between different types of reading. For
| example, I read that many young adults have picked up reading
| "new adult" genre books. They enjoy the physical experience of an
| analog medium and consume one edition after another of popular
| series. This sounds fine at first, but the content is
| problematic. These books are not literature, and they may convey
| problematic views of behavior. For example, they may perpetuate
| outdated views of relationships between men and women, portraying
| them as unequal and reproducing cliched stereotypes from the last
| millennium.
|
| In short, the article focuses only on the amount of reading, but
| the content is also important. This should be part of the
| equation.
| b112 wrote:
| I see no reference to this in the article. Nor have you
| explained why these books are "not literature". This sounds
| like someone looking at a piece of art, and saying "that's not
| art".
|
| As we're referencing young adults here, they already have a
| degree of understanding of the world today. Reading of the
| past, gives historical context to how the world is today, to
| _why_ the world is as it is today. I 'd have hoped they'd been
| well exposed to such things in school, and you can be
| absolutely sure they've been exposed to such things in movies,
| or music (have you heard some rap music?), or.. you know, this
| thing called the Internet.
|
| In 12 seconds I can find more untoward content on the Internet,
| than I could in an entire library or book store.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| When I was that age I read a lot of science fiction series. I
| had friends reading what they called "trashy romance"--they
| knew it was in no way realistic. This was also during peak
| Harry Potter, which is literary street food, and I say that as
| a compliment. Most of us read other stuff too, but
| realistically, dense English lit was confined to English class.
|
| So this isn't new and I don't see the problem.
|
| As for the "views," by this standard kids shouldn't read A Tale
| of Two Cities because it encourages beheadings.
| patrickmay wrote:
| Upvote for "literary street food." Thanks for that.
| mghackerlady wrote:
| Books portraying problematic behaviour doesn't mean it agrees
| with them, Jesus it seems like liberals and pseudo-progressives
| have adopted the right mindset and vocabulary of leftists and
| actual progressives while clinging onto their reactionary
| puritan sensibilities, this time saying something is
| "problematic" instead of demonic
| ofalkaed wrote:
| What is dying when it comes to text is entertainment and some
| areas of non-fiction, things which really are not the strength of
| written language; it is capable of these thing but other mediums
| are far better at it, but even in those areas it has some
| strengths and ability which other mediums lack. The primary
| strength of written language is communication, it removes the
| abstraction and all those things which hinder communication like
| the look of frustration on my face being taken as frustration
| with the person I am speaking to when it is really frustration
| with my own difficulties in expressing what I want to express and
| find those right words which will not be taken any other way than
| as I meant them.
|
| Writing is not dying and is not going to die anytime soon, people
| use it more than they ever have for communication in this texting
| and emailing world and writing will be continued to be used for
| those areas where it is undeniable king. What can explore the
| inner world of people better than the written word? what can
| develop and explore idea to the extent and depth of the written
| word? All those unfilmable books that keep being read are works
| which exploit the strengths of the written word to express things
| which no other medium can without a great deal of abstraction and
| becoming so experimental that only a tiny niche can appreciate
| them and a much smaller niche than the niche that is literature.
| RunSet wrote:
| Isaac Asimov, "The Ancient and the The Ultimate", The Magazine of
| Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 1973
|
| https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v044n01_...
| scandox wrote:
| Elite people don't take books as seriously anymore. That's what's
| happening. The prestige of serious books is diminishing. The
| referencing of serious books in mainstream culture is
| diminishing. If 8 billion people all read one shit book that's
| all well and good - literacy is saved. But if the people who
| currently influence events do not read good books, care to be
| seen to read good books and consider the opinions of the writers
| of good books important ... then I think it's not good.
| ifh-hn wrote:
| I understand the first paragraph is set to draw you in but
| honestly I was thing with every sentence: speak for yourself.
| None of it describes me. It's also not my experience in general,
| but maybe me and those around me are odd?
| ternaryoperator wrote:
| Well, given the detailed statistics re reading in the US, I
| think she is speaking for more than herself, no?
| ravenstine wrote:
| People might still be reading, statistically speaking. But _what_
| are they reading?
|
| Almost everyone I talk to offline either reads fantasy, trashy
| romance, or feel-good self help books. I gotta tell ya, we all
| have our cheap pleasures now and then, but rarely do I meet
| anyone who reads anything remotely profound or thought-provoking.
| The only exception might be my father who reads a lot of
| historical fiction and non-fiction.
|
| Maybe I'm just hanging in the wrong crowds.
|
| In terms of the sources the author cites, exactly how much should
| we trust them? For example, book sales may have increased in
| recent years, but are people actually reading them? I remember a
| recent statistic where it turned out most people who buy vinyl
| records don't even own a record player; what if people are buying
| books so they can sit on a shelf?
|
| And what's so special about _books_ in particular, anyway? What
| 's wrong with reading articles and webpages? I'd be more
| interested in whether those are declining since they are less
| tethered to _entertainment_ , like books are.
| MichaelRo wrote:
| >> And what's so special about books in particular, anyway?
| What's wrong with reading articles and webpages?
|
| Nothing, really, but I suspect that is declining too. I read
| historical books mostly, some 4-5 per year. Like last time I
| ordered "Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying, The Secret
| WWII Transcripts of German POWS", in English because
| unfortunately it wasn't yet translated in my native language.
| But other than that I still read printed magazines. One that my
| father used to read so I picked the habit from him and used to
| be weekly but now it's bi-monthly because ... fewer readers.
| And I read a ton of online articles.
|
| But you can notice the repeating pattern: read, read, read.
| Because I got good at it waay before there was an alternative,
| and because of that, the alternative has supplanted but never
| replaced the original. But my kid? Never read anything in his
| life that wasn't forced upon him. And the whole new generation
| is like this. He can read because can't function in the modern
| world without it but reading as primary source of gathering
| information? No chance.
|
| I suspect this gets us back to medieval times where there are a
| few erudites and lots of imbeciles, my son included.
| Fr0styMatt88 wrote:
| You know it's really strange when I think about it. I no
| longer feel motivated to read books mostly, but I could
| easily spend an hour or two a day reading HN comments and
| Reddit threads.
|
| Although part of that I'm sure is that as I'm visually
| impaired, reading physical books is far more tiring than
| reading off a screen where I can make the text the exact size
| I want.
|
| Used to be a voracious reader as a kid (though 99% non-
| fiction).
| codyb wrote:
| This is why Hackernews and all other social media are
| blocked on my phone which I now leave across the room all
| day long when at home, and at home when I go out a lot of
| times.
|
| Now, I read the New Yorker which I had a pile of half read
| issues. There's one at the table where I eat, one in the
| loo, one on the couch, and when my brain gets tired of
| staring at the wall... I pick up a copy when I don't want
| to do anything particularly creative.
|
| Finishing a good New Yorker article, or a book laying by my
| bed often expands my worldview, my vocabulary, and my
| understanding of current events. Reading a ton of comments
| online has never really produced that same experience even
| in a place like HackerNews which has (IMO) much higher
| quality comments than many places.
|
| So you can get back into it! And it seems to be like riding
| a bike, very easy to get back into. And the more I read,
| the more I'm happy I'm reading.
| kgwxd wrote:
| For me, it's the realization of how much filler (tangents,
| embellishment, hyperbole, pretentiousness, ego, straight up
| BS, etc) is in long form content that makes it's really
| hard to make a commitment to anything new. Once you see it,
| it's ALL you see. I was rewatching some Feynman lectures
| this morning, and I couldn't get past it anymore. What I
| used to find engaging, was a major distraction. And the
| more I learn about stuff, the quicker I see when it's
| happening, even subjects I'm not familiar with.
| Fr0styMatt88 wrote:
| Pop-sci / self-help I feel is particularly egregious in
| this regard. Like you could take the entirety of many
| self-help books and summarise them into a few bullet
| points.
|
| Though having said that, if the ultimate goal of writing
| is to transfer one person's experience of human thought
| to another, then the filler often makes sense. They're
| trying to take you on the same mental journey that they
| went on. At least that's the good-faith interpretation.
|
| I think filler is also akin to the difference in
| experience between listening to an audiobook at 1x speed
| vs say 3x speed. The slower pace gives your brain time to
| work.
|
| But I totally agree, once you know a bunch about a
| subject the filler becomes unnecessary.
| kgwxd wrote:
| > but rarely do I meet anyone who reads anything remotely
| profound or thought-provoking.
|
| A lot of profound and thought-provoking concepts can be, and
| are, conveyed in a TikTok. It used to be you couldn't profit
| off super short content.
| graemep wrote:
| Fantasy can be profound and thought provoking.
|
| I know lots of people who read books and articles. The people I
| know may not be a representative sample either, and the article
| is about US numbers and most people I know are not in the US.
| graemep wrote:
| I have seen numbers showing kids are reading a lot less in
| the UK but I think that is the result of a deteriorating
| educational system that treats reading as a chore, not fun.
| bsder wrote:
| > Fantasy can be profound and thought provoking.
|
| It can be, but there has always been a lot of garbage like
| any art form. "The Well-Tempered Plot Device" is more than 40
| years old now. https://news.ansible.uk/plotdev.html
|
| And even the best authors are infested with "series-itis" and
| especially the fatal malady "series incompletus".
|
| My sci-fi/fantasy reading habit broke because I refused to
| start any series that wasn't finished. Suddenly, 99% of sci-
| fi/fantasy disappeared.
|
| My only hope for David Gerrold to finish the "War Against the
| Chtorr" series is for him to have notes that he hands to
| someone else. The last book was 36 years ago! Don't complain
| to _me_ about George R. R. Martin. Amateurs.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > And what's so special about books in particular, anyway?
|
| About just every end of day, when I go to kiss my wife and my
| kid (11 years old) when they go to their respective beds,
| they're both reading a book.
|
| A book is compliant with a "no screens before bed / no screens
| in the bedroom" policy and that's very particular.
|
| It's also a real physical item that shall working without
| needing to be recharged, that shall keep working when the
| Internet is down, that won't disappear when the site is blocked
| for whatever reason, etc.
| bsder wrote:
| > And what's so special about books in particular, anyway?
|
| Concentration is a skill that needs to be practiced. A book is
| the easiest way to practice that skill.
|
| Concentration is a skill that is useful broadly in human
| endeavors. I'll leave it to the social scientists to document
| the general damage that a lack of concentration does.
|
| I can tell how much damage gets done depending upon the length
| since I last read a book. If I go a couple of months between
| books because of interruptions, my reading speed _drastically_
| slows down. I didn 't notice this happen before the rise of
| cell phones. Back then, a couple months of interruptions didn't
| seem to slow my reading speed much at all.
| ksherlock wrote:
| Back before written deeds and the county clerk keeping track of
| land ownership, it was handled by memory. So they would have a
| young boy witness the land transfer, on the theory that if there
| was a dispute 30 or 40 years into the future, he could testify
| that the transfer happened. And to help him remember, they would
| nail him in the 'nads. Point being, dudes getting nailed in the
| 'nads has a rich historical tradition that pre-dates writing.
| BinaryIgor wrote:
| "Perhaps there are frontiers of digital addiction we have yet to
| reach. Maybe one day we'll all have Neuralinks that beam
| Instagram Reels directly into our primary visual cortex, and then
| reading will really be toast."
|
| Even then, smart people will care about dissecting ideas, explore
| new concepts and broaden their understanding - and for most of
| it, Text Is King.
| andrewshadura wrote:
| Referring to a recent debate on HN, if text is king, what is
| queen?
| teekert wrote:
| Boring books? Sure I grab the phone. I'm probably as addicted as
| anyone. Bobbiverse? I drop the phone and read all five parts
| during any spare minute I have.
|
| So there's that anacdote.
| Insanity wrote:
| I finished the first two bobbiverse books, then got sidetracked
| during the third book (reading Guns, Germs and Steel) and am
| now on a history/biology binge instead.
|
| But that said, the first two were great books and I'll get back
| to the third book once I've finished my non-fiction cycle. (I
| tend to go back and forth lol)
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