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The gist of what he's saying is pretty sound, but he should have gone deeper. For a deeper argument on the importance of "text", the written word, exposition -
by VoodooJuJu 6y ago
The gist of what he's saying is pretty sound, but he should have gone deeper. For a deeper argument on the importance of "text", the written word, exposition - I recommend reading Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death.
People here are suggesting that images/video are superior, but there's the cliche, "a picture is worth a thousand words". Well, which thousand words? Do they convey the same thousand words to you as they do to me?
Words leave nothing to the imagination. This is one of the most important traits of good exposition. Its arguments/messages are out there, free of the primate dominance gestures, the biases, the emotional stimulants, waiting to be vetted for their logical soundness.
- darau1 6y agoI prefer text simply because I can read the same text faster than anyone could dictate it to me. Plus I can CTRL+F through text.
- wycy 6y ago> Words leave nothing to the imagination. Words leave plenty to the imagination too. Interpreting what authors might've meant in books is all we ever did in English classes in school. Interpreting what the founding fathers might've meant in the Constitution is also a fierce public debate.
- serverholic 6y agoThis is the problem with these constant black and white debates on hacker news. They leave no room for subtly and you end up with people saying dumb shit like "Words leave nothing to the imagination."
- hashkb 6y agoYou can teach someone to paint or take photos, with text. You can't teach someone to write with paintings, or with text-less video.
- andrewflnr 6y ago> Words leave nothing to the imagination. If only. Differing interpretations of words are one of the dominant sources of political discord in the US. The things words leave to the imagination are killing people.
- Banana699 6y agoText is free of dominance gestures and emotions ? Have you ever paid attention to the words a politician might say? or the lyrics of a rap song? there are words in text that convey more emotions and gestures than if the speaker was face-to-face spitting the words personally on you. Even more when you know the original speaker beforehand and your brain is animating the syntax with their face and voice. It's just a tradeoff ladder. Pictures represent pure unmitigated creativity, photographs represent the world, text is pictures + grammar, mathematics is when you compress the grammar to a few dead-simple rules that yiu could teach a bunch of silicate rocks to understand. At each step in the ladder, you lose freedom and expressiveness broadness but you gain freedom and expressiveness in a much more Domain-Specific way. And off course there are imperfections and leakages everywhere.