This is a repost from
https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html
(originally posted on )
@graydon2:
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.
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.
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.
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:
. 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.
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.
Also, read this