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Text is not the oldest - nor easiest to use -, text is a heavy abstraction born somewhat recently in human history. The oldest and easiest is the visual in 3D,

Text is not the oldest - nor easiest to use -, text is a heavy abstraction born somewhat recently in human history. The oldest and easiest is the visual in 3D, then comes the visual in 2D. Those exist since we have eyes. Our brain have dedicated and sizeable infrastructure for that. Children can communicate in 3D (gestures, posture, expressions, objects) and in 2D drawings before learning textural communication with great effort. Text is more regular and reliable in certain contexts (not always, sometimes a pictogram or others are better), when the circumstances are proper for that. Text has its uses, just like all the other forms, not being paramount, not at all! (I'd also argue about that we could read old texts. Sometimes yes, but sometimes we cannot read present ones neither if the cultural and knowledge background is inadequate. Which is just aggravated by the ages)

sillysaurusx 6y ago
That's true. But the oldest isn't necessarily the best; civilization happened at roughly the same time text started becoming widespread, and that doesn't seem like a coincidence. It's also interesting that 3D is so hard to translate into a usable context in computing. VR has felt like a second-class citizen compared to a mouse and keyboard in terms of usability. Not that the two are mutually exclusive – it was nice having as many giant monitors as you wanted in a 3D space. What's needed is a 3D web browser, with websites connected with portals that you can walk through. I think gather.town is surprisingly close to that. http://gather.town/ http://gather.town/
- atonalfreerider 6y ago
  Please also see primitive.io which is a VR browser for GitHub.
powerapple 6y ago
The reason human knowledge develops so fast is the existence of text. If we rely on visual in 3D we will be the same as other animals. Apparently now we are behaving badly since we are consuming videos and pictures rather than text. I believe text is superior because of its abstraction, when you read, you are creating alongside the author.
- salimjjuma 6y ago
  So true
- dalbasal 6y ago
  Re: history. I agree on the power of text as a technology, and the role it played. China & the Roman Republic/Empire are good examples of this. But.... I think it's worth remembering that we lost something as we gained something. We tend to severely underestimate oral "technologies." Scholarship existed before writing. History, geography, etc. Text spent centuries or millennia as a peripheral media. It was mostly used for accounting in Mesopotamia & the Levant for thousands if years. Sometimes for religious, magical or political reasons. It wasn't a major medium for philosophy, storytelling, history or such until much later... So writing didn't really play much of a "knowledge accumulation" role until pretty late in the game. I suspect that it developed so slowly because oral traditions were hard to beat. They had their own advantages. A song was an efficient way to learn history. An important, if subtle, fact is that mediums are not just for communication. They're modes of thought. Text and speech will yield different ideas. Mathematics are a huge example. Ways of conveying mathematical concepts (eg negative numbers) enables us to conceive of mathematical concepts. If you write an essay, the ideas/conclusions you will have will be different. Even the difference between a scroll and a codex (book) can make a big difference. That difference is evident if you compare the modern practice of Judaism (scroll tradition) to Islam and Christianity (book traditions). Socrates/Plato give us a nominally dividing line between the oral and written approaches. Socrates may have even been illiterate, but either way, his main medium was oral. In fact, most Greek philosophy came from the "mostly oral" period. This is why Plato, Aristotle, (Diogenes?) and others of that generation become so important. They're the link. They wrote down ideas created by oralists. This is how they could be accessed by macedonians, Romans and such. I wonder if the charming, curious style we associate with the likes of Socrates or Diogenes is inherent to oralism. Compare them to later, literary philosophers... The literalists are far more grim. Senecca comes to mind. Even Aristotle. He's not as grim as roman philosophers, but he is a lot more serious. The oralists were playful... and greek/roman philosophy (imo) declines as writing overtakes oral traditions. Socrates' thoughts "On the Forgetfulness that Comes with Writing" are recorded (tellingly) by Plato. It's not Plato's best piece, but very relevant to our times. If you memorise instead of using text, all your knowledge is inside your head. On paper, ideas are lifeless. Living ideas inside your head interact with each other, refine, create new ideas. When we convey them to one another, we can ask questions, read expressions, etc. We don't just have books, we have the internet and pocket computers to access it. Socrates' point applies even more now. One relevant example relevant to our times is "shades of uncertainty." Say you read an article about the economy, GDP growth, unemployment & such. A lot of that information is uncertain, either inherently or at this point in time. There may be dissident positions. That's usually lost in text but not in conversation. I definitely think a short conversation about this year's economic data is more informative and deep than an article by that same economist.
kuu 6y ago
Text, in the end, is not more than a 2D agreed representation. It's drawing + rules.
atoav 6y ago
As someone who worked long in the visual field (Film, VFX, Graphics, Art) and has a ton of experience with text based expression (studied philosophy, programming) in my eyes picture based communication certainly is powerful. However reading pictures is much more subjective than most non-arts-educated might tend to realise. We had a weekly class where we would discuss scenes and pictures and what it evoked in people, what they "read" in it. The one big takeaway I got from this, is just how profoundly different a room full of people can see very clear pictures. This subjectiveness is even worse when you look at gestures and body language of actors – what one student saw as strong and self sufficient, the other might see as forceful and destructive etc. Of course we also have codified visual languages (traffic signs, warning labels, ...), but they only will work for low complexity info ("Warning slippy surface", but not: "Watch out the last step of that stairway was built to high and might cause you to fall"). The low information density of such symbols is great if you want simple messages to be understandable by a big number of persons very quickly and with little cognitive overhead. Text can shine when symbols don't suffice, when pictures are to vague, when gestures are unclear. Text is easy to create, modify and copy and I love it for that. My freelance time as a graphic designer convinced me that many people think they can communicate visually, while very few actually can. A lot of people already have issues with getting their message (be it text or spoken word) understood in the way they meant it at the side of the recipient, with visual language this is likely worse.
- Banana699 6y ago
  The thing is, "text" and "pictures" are somewhat vague super-categories that aren't very well defined in a lot of comments on this thread. It's ironic that a discussion about the precision of text is noisy because of of the imprecision of text. Are emojies text ? the blog post found a 4000-byte Twitter logo and cited this as evidence of the efficiency of text, but they forgot that there is a vast store of similary-sized photos that cost nothing more than 3 or 4 bytes and sometimes less, comparable to the very same letters they are using to write the post (and conveying much more than a single useless-on-its-own sound). By any definition that depend on the fact that text is stored as contiguous bytes, emojies ARE text. Are 2D tables text ? they are not linear (not as we see them) yet one table with entries arranged appropriately could be much more percise and expressive than a truck-load of prose paragraphs. And an xy plot is much more expressive than both. 2D tables is not that much more expensive in storage than text though (a bunch of html tags surrounding the text is one representation), and an xy plot could be derived from a table by computation. So with a little bit of computation you gain the precision and expressiveness of a visual plot with the storage overhead of a bunch of numbers. This example (simplistically) mirrors current work in ML on compression of photos and videos. Imagine if computers are advanced enough that a picture is no more storage than an emojii, all arguments. about "efficiency" of text that appeal to its economic representation in computer memory become moot then. The point I'm making is: "text" vs. "pictures" is not fine-grained enough of a distinction. The real distinction is [ "numbers" vs. "graphs" vs. "letters" vs. "tables" vs. ...), its a big multiway competition between various forms of symbols and symbol-organization schemas humans invented for a variety of purposes and arguments for or against any of them shouldn't appeal to how they are represented or communicated (text could be drawn on photos or arranged on powerpoint slides, images could be compressed and redrawn to a high degree of fidelity). And there is a lot of paradigms "in-between" that piggy-backs on one of the two representation but aren't either of them (plots, tables, emojies). Tools and technological limitations are also to blame for a lot of pictures' shortcomings, the ability to copy-paste being one of them. A lot of discussions here would benefit alot if all parties state beforehand exactly what are their definition of text and what their argument appeals to in that definition.
naringas 6y ago
> visual in 3D I cannot see in visual 3D. If anything I can see in strictly bigger than 2D. (a flat 'screen' with a tinge of depth perception, which I fear I don't make much use of when I spend most of my time in front of a flat 2D computer screen)

sillysaurusx 6y ago

That's true. But the oldest isn't necessarily the best; civilization happened at roughly the same time text started becoming widespread, and that doesn't seem like a coincidence. It's also interesting that 3D is so hard to translate into a usable context in computing. VR has felt like a second-class citizen compared to a mouse and keyboard in terms of usability. Not that the two are mutually exclusive – it was nice having as many giant monitors as you wanted in a 3D space. What's needed is a 3D web browser, with websites connected with portals that you can walk through. I think gather.town is surprisingly close to that. http://gather.town/ http://gather.town/

atonalfreerider 6y ago
Please also see primitive.io which is a VR browser for GitHub.

powerapple 6y ago

The reason human knowledge develops so fast is the existence of text. If we rely on visual in 3D we will be the same as other animals. Apparently now we are behaving badly since we are consuming videos and pictures rather than text. I believe text is superior because of its abstraction, when you read, you are creating alongside the author.

salimjjuma 6y ago
So true
dalbasal 6y ago
Re: history. I agree on the power of text as a technology, and the role it played. China & the Roman Republic/Empire are good examples of this. But.... I think it's worth remembering that we lost something as we gained something. We tend to severely underestimate oral "technologies." Scholarship existed before writing. History, geography, etc. Text spent centuries or millennia as a peripheral media. It was mostly used for accounting in Mesopotamia & the Levant for thousands if years. Sometimes for religious, magical or political reasons. It wasn't a major medium for philosophy, storytelling, history or such until much later... So writing didn't really play much of a "knowledge accumulation" role until pretty late in the game. I suspect that it developed so slowly because oral traditions were hard to beat. They had their own advantages. A song was an efficient way to learn history. An important, if subtle, fact is that mediums are not just for communication. They're modes of thought. Text and speech will yield different ideas. Mathematics are a huge example. Ways of conveying mathematical concepts (eg negative numbers) enables us to conceive of mathematical concepts. If you write an essay, the ideas/conclusions you will have will be different. Even the difference between a scroll and a codex (book) can make a big difference. That difference is evident if you compare the modern practice of Judaism (scroll tradition) to Islam and Christianity (book traditions). Socrates/Plato give us a nominally dividing line between the oral and written approaches. Socrates may have even been illiterate, but either way, his main medium was oral. In fact, most Greek philosophy came from the "mostly oral" period. This is why Plato, Aristotle, (Diogenes?) and others of that generation become so important. They're the link. They wrote down ideas created by oralists. This is how they could be accessed by macedonians, Romans and such. I wonder if the charming, curious style we associate with the likes of Socrates or Diogenes is inherent to oralism. Compare them to later, literary philosophers... The literalists are far more grim. Senecca comes to mind. Even Aristotle. He's not as grim as roman philosophers, but he is a lot more serious. The oralists were playful... and greek/roman philosophy (imo) declines as writing overtakes oral traditions. Socrates' thoughts "On the Forgetfulness that Comes with Writing" are recorded (tellingly) by Plato. It's not Plato's best piece, but very relevant to our times. If you memorise instead of using text, all your knowledge is inside your head. On paper, ideas are lifeless. Living ideas inside your head interact with each other, refine, create new ideas. When we convey them to one another, we can ask questions, read expressions, etc. We don't just have books, we have the internet and pocket computers to access it. Socrates' point applies even more now. One relevant example relevant to our times is "shades of uncertainty." Say you read an article about the economy, GDP growth, unemployment & such. A lot of that information is uncertain, either inherently or at this point in time. There may be dissident positions. That's usually lost in text but not in conversation. I definitely think a short conversation about this year's economic data is more informative and deep than an article by that same economist.

kuu 6y ago

Text, in the end, is not more than a 2D agreed representation. It's drawing + rules.

atoav 6y ago

As someone who worked long in the visual field (Film, VFX, Graphics, Art) and has a ton of experience with text based expression (studied philosophy, programming) in my eyes picture based communication certainly is powerful. However reading pictures is much more subjective than most non-arts-educated might tend to realise. We had a weekly class where we would discuss scenes and pictures and what it evoked in people, what they "read" in it. The one big takeaway I got from this, is just how profoundly different a room full of people can see very clear pictures. This subjectiveness is even worse when you look at gestures and body language of actors – what one student saw as strong and self sufficient, the other might see as forceful and destructive etc. Of course we also have codified visual languages (traffic signs, warning labels, ...), but they only will work for low complexity info ("Warning slippy surface", but not: "Watch out the last step of that stairway was built to high and might cause you to fall"). The low information density of such symbols is great if you want simple messages to be understandable by a big number of persons very quickly and with little cognitive overhead. Text can shine when symbols don't suffice, when pictures are to vague, when gestures are unclear. Text is easy to create, modify and copy and I love it for that. My freelance time as a graphic designer convinced me that many people think they can communicate visually, while very few actually can. A lot of people already have issues with getting their message (be it text or spoken word) understood in the way they meant it at the side of the recipient, with visual language this is likely worse.

Banana699 6y ago
The thing is, "text" and "pictures" are somewhat vague super-categories that aren't very well defined in a lot of comments on this thread. It's ironic that a discussion about the precision of text is noisy because of of the imprecision of text. Are emojies text ? the blog post found a 4000-byte Twitter logo and cited this as evidence of the efficiency of text, but they forgot that there is a vast store of similary-sized photos that cost nothing more than 3 or 4 bytes and sometimes less, comparable to the very same letters they are using to write the post (and conveying much more than a single useless-on-its-own sound). By any definition that depend on the fact that text is stored as contiguous bytes, emojies ARE text. Are 2D tables text ? they are not linear (not as we see them) yet one table with entries arranged appropriately could be much more percise and expressive than a truck-load of prose paragraphs. And an xy plot is much more expressive than both. 2D tables is not that much more expensive in storage than text though (a bunch of html tags surrounding the text is one representation), and an xy plot could be derived from a table by computation. So with a little bit of computation you gain the precision and expressiveness of a visual plot with the storage overhead of a bunch of numbers. This example (simplistically) mirrors current work in ML on compression of photos and videos. Imagine if computers are advanced enough that a picture is no more storage than an emojii, all arguments. about "efficiency" of text that appeal to its economic representation in computer memory become moot then. The point I'm making is: "text" vs. "pictures" is not fine-grained enough of a distinction. The real distinction is [ "numbers" vs. "graphs" vs. "letters" vs. "tables" vs. ...), its a big multiway competition between various forms of symbols and symbol-organization schemas humans invented for a variety of purposes and arguments for or against any of them shouldn't appeal to how they are represented or communicated (text could be drawn on photos or arranged on powerpoint slides, images could be compressed and redrawn to a high degree of fidelity). And there is a lot of paradigms "in-between" that piggy-backs on one of the two representation but aren't either of them (plots, tables, emojies). Tools and technological limitations are also to blame for a lot of pictures' shortcomings, the ability to copy-paste being one of them. A lot of discussions here would benefit alot if all parties state beforehand exactly what are their definition of text and what their argument appeals to in that definition.

naringas 6y ago

> visual in 3D I cannot see in visual 3D. If anything I can see in strictly bigger than 2D. (a flat 'screen' with a tinge of depth perception, which I fear I don't make much use of when I spend most of my time in front of a flat 2D computer screen)