Text Is King

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/text-is-king

by zdw • 6 months ago

184 88 6 months ago

Shellban• 6 months ago

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_3• 6 months ago

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.

pixl972• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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.

piekvorst2• 6 months ago

No prominent writer has ever said that writing came easy to them. I think it’s not wrong to feel this way.

conductr• 6 months ago

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).

uberstuber• 6 months ago

Tools like descript let you edit video by editing the transcript text

JamesTRexx3• 6 months ago

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).

volemo2• 6 months ago

But a book is neither searchable, nor easily copyable. :/

mold_aid• 6 months ago

I guess the latter depends on your standards for "ease" and the former your ability to find an "index"

squigz• 6 months ago

Ebooks are

t-3• 6 months ago

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.

taeric• 6 months ago

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.

mghackerlady3• 6 months ago

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

JamesTRexx3• 6 months ago

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.

xacky• 6 months ago

I'm still a Slashdotter, I use it more than HN. Although Slashdot isn't as fun since they cracked down on trolling.

boredemployee• 6 months ago

> 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_3• 6 months ago

It's just the introduction that highlights the "reading is doomed!" narrative, the rest of the article says it's not actually so bad.

mghackerlady3• 6 months ago

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)

n4r94• 6 months ago

Text is searchable, skippable, scrollable, compact, transmissible, and accessible in a way that audio and video have never managed to be.

piekvorst2• 6 months ago

It’s also runnable (scripts), clickable (urls), and context-dependent, which makes it a nice UI.

lelanthran• 6 months ago

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.

CuriouslyC2• 6 months ago

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.

eviks3• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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.

n4r94• 6 months ago

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

reb• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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.

BinaryIgor2• 6 months ago

It also the most portable - no codecs, no formats and standards; most English texts are just ASCII :)

psychoslave• 6 months ago

How is ASCII not a standard?

And writing system don't fall out of nowhere, especially something as baroque as English which is all but phonetic.

dyauspitr• 6 months ago

Video to a lot of people is way more engaging than text. Also video is much more information dense. You can’t teach people to do things over purely text but show them a video and a 1000 different indescribables become instantly apparent.

That being said I love a good book over its movie version anyway. Because text is cheap there is so much more detail you can include. There is no way text can compete with the information density of a video.

MarceliusK3• 6 months ago

Text has a bunch of second-order properties that only become obvious once you try to replace it

kalleboo• 6 months ago

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_3• 6 months ago

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).

pixl972• 6 months ago

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.

nerdponx• 6 months ago

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.

cal_dent2• 6 months ago

That distinction between passive and active is why i've never been able to get on board with podcasts as a true medium for learning/understanding anything. Its a lack of discipline on my part because I'd end up doing something else as well and the information doesn't really truly get through (that feeling when you realise you've had it on for 10 mins but have not really actually listened to it). That's not possible at all with text as a medium, the brain has to latch on.

MarceliusK3• 6 months ago

Video monetizes attention better, but writing still monetizes authority better

mi_lk• 6 months ago

most certainly in the west, but not sure about the rest of the world

wosined• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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 clichéd 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• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

Upvote for "literary street food." Thanks for that.

mghackerlady3• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

Well, given the detailed statistics re reading in the US, I think she is speaking for more than herself, no?

ravenstine• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

> 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.

Fr0styMatt882• 6 months ago

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).

kgwxd3• 6 months ago

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.

graemep2• 6 months ago

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.

graemep2• 6 months ago

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.

bsder3• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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.

bsder3• 6 months ago

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 and my patience is really compromised. 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• 6 months ago

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.

bayesnet• 6 months ago

Ok I just had to look this up. There’s a kernel of truth but I didn’t find evidence of genital mutilation: “Sometimes the boys were whipped or violently bumped on the boundary stones to make them remember”( “Beating the bounds”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beating_the_bounds?wprov=sfti1 )

BinaryIgor2• 6 months ago

"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• 6 months ago

Referring to a recent debate on HN, if text is king, what is queen?

teekert• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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)

MarceliusK3• 6 months ago

Even if people read fewer books cover to cover, text still seems to be the medium where ideas actually get nailed down, argued over, and preserved

Text Is King

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