I enjoy reading as much as anyone, but I find these kinds of posts to be very short-sighted.
First off, civilization precedes mass reading by millennia. To attribute the Enlightenment and modern industrial civilization to reading, and any counter-movement against the Enlightenment as anti-reading, is to fundamentally misunderstand most of history.
E.g., Romanticism was an explicitly anti-Enlightenment movement and arguably had more interest in poetry and literature than the forces it was reacting against. You could also probably make the argument that widespread reading via the printing press led to more anti-intellectualism culturally, as the onus of belief shifted from the elite priestly class to the popular individual.
Secondly, the vast, vast majority of people were not reading complex literature or scientific papers, they were reading the equivalent of Netflix series. Deep, intellectual reading has always been a niche thing reserved for a small percentage of the population.
Thirdly, and I think most importantly: reading is a historical technology. It's not the end-all greatest thing ever invented, never to be surpassed by anything new.
I personally think that audiovisual media is far, far superior to reading in many situations, especially for education - language learning, for example. The problem right now is that we're assuming that short clip-based media like TikTok is somehow the ultimate form of video. It's not, and short attention spans are more due to the economics of media consumption than anything inherent to the video format.
I think we're just very, very early in the development of a new media format that combines the best elements of text, audio, moving images, and other data in a way that is ultimately more compelling and effective than static words on paper. Video, like books, is ultimately a historical technology and not necessarily the end-all of future media.
>I personally think that audiovisual media is far, far superior to reading
From my personal experience, reading is the closest humankind as ever got to holodecks. There is nothing except reading that provides that level of immersion, and there will not be until we _actually_ invent the holodecks.
I'm not so sure. I live in a reality with more detail and fidelity than a holodeck, and I still often find books to be more immersive.
If I had a holodeck I'd probably use it to sit somewhere nice and well lighted and read a book.
to be fair, I was simplifying my point a bit: by holodeck I actually meant the immersive VR from The Culture.
100 years of pro-reading propaganda. Like nukes dropped on our culture. It will take time for those craters to fade. Until then expect everybody you meet to suffer from an irrational compulsion to read and venerate readers.
Sorry, you'll have to send that as an audio clip, I can't read, I'm too cultural.
Your shallow sarcasm does nothing to mask your abject indoctrinatedness.
Hey, I don't venerate readers, I hate it when people read Sense and Sensibility or War and Peace or Moby Dick out of worthiness. I read what I want, and I read a lot of trash, not important works of literature. Though Moby Dick has a chapter that's all about sailors lovingly holding hands in a bucket of warm sperm, and another one about a priest wearing a whale's penis as a coat, so it's not all bad. But I don't think old Herman really intended it as reading matter, to be honest, it seemed to me more like a hostile act, a 200,000 word prank. But I like reading adventure stories and gumshoe pulp, and I don't want it all converted to videos.
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I don't know, I think that a video of someone doing X thing is vastly more inheritable than a description of it in a book. For raw data or information though, sure, text is better.
> I personally think that audiovisual media is far, far superior to reading.
I'd be very interested to know why you think this.
I personally prefer reading as a way to intake information, because I'm faster and more at least reading a bunch of stuff than I am watching a bunch of youtube videos.
Sorry I edited my comment and expanded it.
I think audiovisual media is better for most educational things, especially languages and skills. If you're learning Spanish or how to fix your car, I think a video (with audio) is better than a book most of the time. To be fair, there are definitely things better taught via book, but I do wonder if part of the reason why is 1) books have a longer history and 2) watching video is still kind of an awkward experience; I can't easily grab text from inside it or view the entire contents at once, like I can with text.
But more generally, I think audiovisual media just more closely matches the human experience of the world. Sitting hunched over an object looking at symbols is a learned activity, whereas watching and hearing something is more "natural" to people – see for example, how most languages were spoken-only for a long, long time before anyone wrote them down.
> Sitting hunched over an object looking at symbols is a learned activity, whereas watching and hearing something is more "natural" to people
Isn’t this the benefit? It’s conducive to abstract thought in a way recorded media is not. (The historical alternative is in-person rhetoric. As we all know, the online version is not substitute for debate.)
> civilization precedes mass reading by millennia
The elites were always voracious readers. Mass reading isn’t necessary for civilisation, but it probably is if we’re going to treat the masses like elites.
>The elites were always voracious readers
Since when? All the elites I know spend their time taking expensive vacations and doing too much drugs.
Those are not elites but wealthy, if completely irrelevant people.
Elites would be powerful politicians, advisors, or big-scale investors that pull actual strings. And these people are pretty universally voracious readers.