Open Mike: The Video / Text Divide (OT)

Take a look at this:

It's the first page of one of those online quizzes meant to induce you to look at page after page of ads. The opening gambit was, "Your Memory Is Excellent If You Can Name Just 12 of These Iconic People." Among the other big mysteries: Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, Frank Sinatra, and Muhammed Ali.

I didn't take the bait, but I think my "personality result" (personal result, I think they mean) would have been pretty good.

In a recent article in The Atlantic, a teacher recounted the time one of his Gen Z students told him that some illustrations of Civil War manuscripts had been useless to him, because "of course" he couldn't read cursive.

Had I heard him correctly? Who else can’t read cursive? I asked the class. The answer: about two-thirds. And who can’t write it? Even more. What did they do about signatures? They had invented them by combining vestiges of whatever cursive instruction they may have had with creative squiggles and flourishes. Amused by my astonishment, the students offered reflections about the place—or absence—of handwriting in their lives...in my ignorance, I became...a Rip van Winkle confronting a transformed world.

I had my Rip van Winkle moment with my son and his Gen Y friends when they were teenagers, in our kitchen. This would have been 2009 or so. One of them asked what time it was, and another answered that she didn't know. This astonished me, because our kitchen was small and there was a giant clock about a foot in diameter hanging on the wall just a few feet from their noses.

You're ahead of me: they had never learned how to tell time on an analog clock. Or rather, one of the five had: he stared at the clock, took his time like it was a math problem, then gave the correct answer. Of course I immediately sprang to action, taking the clock down off the wall and proposing to give them all a very short course in that simple subject. But my son took me by the arm and, in a voice like he was talking to a simpleton, said, "Dad. We're late. We've gotta go. Some other time."

Mickey who?
I actually remember exactly how Gen Z people must feel about Elvis and Madonna. When I was their age, there were all these people I was supposed to know about but didn't, and I remember how that felt. Johnny Carson (who most people born after 2000 probably don't know) would make references to Jack Benny, and I had no idea who Jack Benny was. Benny Goodman, Mae West, Doris Day, Sammy Davis Jr., Jimmy Cagney, Buster Keaton, and on and on—sorry. Mickey Mouse I knew, Mickey Spillane or Mickey Rooney not so much. Only gradually did the identities of many of the famous names from before my time fill in. 

Of course, Gen Z people know a lot of things I don't. I opted not to take "typing" in school, reasoning that I would never be...a secretary. (I did my own writing in longhand at the time.) I remember right where I was when I made the decision. Here's my comment about that choice now: !!! Or "WTF," as the kids would type it, with their thumbs. It's called keyboarding now, and keyboarding, they know. In deciding whether to include keyboarding or cursive in school curricula, who would choose cursive? Good thing, too—having typed more than ten million words in my life, I still can't type. Serves me right.

Hieroglyphics from another era. Illiterates used to call
writing like this "chicken scratchings."

My great-aunt Frances "Dickie" Schirmer, who lived to within two months of her 102nd birthday and was an exceptionally intelligent and disciplined person, used to read People magazine cover to cover in her late nineties so she could follow conversations among young people. But do I know who Zendaya and Rowan Blanchard are? Not before writing this post I didn't.

Here's my theory
So anyway, I think this might make a good sociological study: survey people as to whether they find it more efficient and comfortable to ingest information as video or text, and find out what you can find out about that. Are there dividing lines? Where are they? I call myself a "creature of the written word," but that's because I'm unusually literate compared to the general population: I read 50 books a year, have a vocabulary in the 95th percentile (almost too high to be a writer), and write every day. I value good videos like everyone else does, but the medium as a whole is decidedly second-rate to me unless the subject is suited to it. It tends to go at its own slow pace, you can't skip ahead or back easily, you can't skim to get the gist, and it's awkward to extract quotations. (Gen Z doesn't know that quotation is a noun and quote a verb—but then, neither do many people of my generation, and I have trouble keeping it straight myself.) My point is just that I'm comfortable with text and I find it convenient. It's efficient for me. I'm sure there are people who find it tough slogging, slow going, full of distractions and fluff or waste, and who feel the information they want is buried too deep. A talking head in a video talks faster than they can read. And why toil away reading a whole book when you can watch the movie in two hours?

I suspect at some point in the march of the generations there's a Video / Text Divide. But I don't know. (Maybe there's a video about it out there somewhere.) Either way, which side you fall on isn't a matter of virtue or intelligence or your worth or value. More likely, it's just a sign of the times in which you grew up.

Mike
My flickr page / My New Yorker author page

P.S. Did the typo in the headline of the "Iconic People Quiz" jump out at you, or pass you by?

Original contents copyright 2022 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Stephen Cowdery: "Text is usually more efficient, especially at conveying information. Video is usually better at portraying a scene. One of the blessings of YouTube is the ability to close-caption and playback at a higher speed; a lot of video producers think they are film-makers, two different disciplines. Going beyond the mundane, great writing can do things that great film-making can't do and vice versa."

John Camp: "I knew celebrities who were far old than I—a couple of generations back—because I was a kid at the beginnings of commercial TV in the early '50s, and the afternoons were filled with early movies because there really wasn't anything else to broadcast. My memory may be faulty, but I believe that on occasion, we'd get a silent movie with organ music. As television developed, the old stuff went away. I missed the typo even though I read and write for a living, because I don't read from left to right. I read a block at a time, so I knew what the headline said. This is a big disadvantage when copy editing and proof reading, because when you know what something says you miss the small stuff. This also gives me a chance to mention my favorite headline of the past few years, buried at the very bottom of the New York Post's front page a few weeks back: 'Florida Man Makes Announcement.' The Post was also the originator of the famous 'Headless Body in Topless Bar,' about a bloody NYC murder."

Mike replies: My art teacher used to collect absurdist tabloid headlines. His favorite was: "Man Decapitates Self with Chainsaw—AND LIVES!" The thing that tickled him about it was, as he said, "somebody looked at 'man decapitates self with chainsaw' and decided it wasn't quite enough."

Benjamin Marks: "Most '-tion' words are nouns.

Pollution
Subtitution
Tuition
Fluctuation
Predation
"Stay-cation"
Faction
Ration

...etc. In fact, if you look up '-tion' in Wiki-whatever, you will find: '-tion: (non-productive) Used to form nouns meaning "the action of (a verb)" or "the result of (a verb)." Words ending in this suffix are almost always derived from a similar Latin word; a few (e.g. gumption) are not derived from Latin and are unrelated to any verb. More often, -ation is used.' (Wiktionary)"

David Brown (partial comment): "I’m on the text side of the text/video divide. It comes down to practicality. Text has three things going for it that video lacks. The first is random access. It is very easy to find the information I need in a book, as opposed to a video (aren’t indexes wonderful things?). The second and probably most important is information density. I can read must faster than I can watch a video, given identical subject matter. And third, there is retention. It’s a personal thing, but I retain information much better if I’ve read something than if I’ve watched a video."

Bill Tyler: "The linguist John McWhorter recently wrote a piece about cursive and its obsolescence. He argues that it's not an important skill in today's world, and becoming less so all the time, comparing it to Roman numerals. I think he has a point, though as a certified (certifiable?) old guy, I will miss it.

"About information—whether a well-done video or the written word is preferable depends very much on the material itself. Unless there's a visual component to the underlying subject, I prefer written information. Note that I used the phrase 'well-done' in describing video. Most videos these days seem to have a lot of fluff surrounding a very tiny kernel of useful material.

"Oh—you mentioned vocabulary, so I thought I'd take an online vocabulary test. I quit when I found 'imminent' misspelled as 'immenent.' Previously, the test had given a set of proposed antonyms for 'lonely' that did not include anything remotely resembling a correct answer."

Keith Cartmell (partial comment): "Books usually have a table of contents, and the useful ones usually have an index. Videos are only just beginning to have something that crudely resembles a table of contents. I can read far quicker than people talk in a video, and most of them take forever to get to the point, with pointless diversions along the way. It's infuriating. And the book is almost always better than the movie, especially if it's a good book. Some content only exists on video. Sigh."

Mike replies: I think semi-pro video makers are learning to get along with it. Two of the channels I frequent are RealLifeLore, which teaches geography (a subject tragically neglected in schools, like civics), and Blacktail Studio, which shows an enterprising fellow (really, as he gradually reveals all his activities you realize he has too much energy for any one person) doing woodworking projects. Take a look at the beginning of one of the Blacktail videos—you'll see within the first few seconds how he speeds up the action to get through naturally sluggish sequences quickly. As for RealLifeLore, watch the first few seconds of "Why No One Has Measured the Coastline of Britain," about the Coastline Paradox. As you'll see, or rather hear, he doesn't waste any time getting the words out!

RubyT: "I definitely prefer print. I process information visually much better than aurally. I will say that I have found videos to be less irritating since my youngest showed me how to speed them up. Depending on the natural speed of the speaker, I listen to most videos at between 1.5 and 2X. I do type (the single most useful class I took in high school, in 1983), I do read and write cursive, and I only wish my own penmanship were the equal of the 'chicken scratch' in the example you posted."

Kent Wiley: "Neil Postman's amusing and prescient 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death deals with this divide between the literacy of text and its demise due to the ascendancy of video images. The modern filmed equivalent would be Idiocracy."

Dave Karp: "Most of my college students (freshmen and sophomores) don't know how to write in cursive. Similarity, most of them can't touch type either! I realized this when I saw some of their notes, all in printing. They can't keep up and they can't type. Our college will make sure that the students who can't afford a computer have loaner Chromebooks, but it doesn't help with the note taking because they cannot type."

psu: "I like both text (books, PDFs, web pages) and video when done well. Video is most effective when dealing with subjects that benefit from being able to visualize what's going on. There are some amazing math and physics videos on YouTube that do this. Video is also great for explaining things that require audio like music. I like this guy, Adam Neely. I don't think there should really be a divide in media. The divide is in production quality and how well people use their medium choice to get the message across."

Ilkka: "One big difference between text and video as ways to transmit information is the ease of editing. It is common to make typing errors or accidentally use the wrong word. Easy to fix when writing. A lot harder to do on video. To the extent that most people don’t even bother to fix it. This is one thing I didn’t like in the (old) Luminous Landscape videos when Michael was reviewing equipment. They were great when showing and discussing locations. But in the equipment reviews they were weak at actually transmitting detailed information and the occasional errors really struck my ear. I watched them all because I had paid for them, but still today I hardly ever watch any equipment reviews on video."

Comments

[John]

As a foreigner coming to this country when I was 26, I missed out on some American habits and icons, be it a TV celebrity who hadn't made it across the Atlantic or Twinkies...

I think for a while I was caught up, but the last decade or so I'm falling behind my children. Quite honestly, I don't care.

About writing vs video, I'm a writing guy, but I also readily admit that in a sense what we generally do all day is listen do other people anyway and a lot of what videos do is people talking to you. I just hate the fluff, but that's true of bad writing as well, just as it is of bad video (I thought, until my kid told me that videos have to be a certain length to be able to get monetized, so it's fluff with a purpose).

[Rick in CO]

I get a kick out of watching Jeopardy when not one of the contestants, all usually under 50, have no idea for a 1950's to 1970's trivia question that was mainstream to us older folks.
I can identify with them however, for a book I researched on Linhof Cameras I had to delve into the 1900's German cursive style print where I could not make out an "f" from "s" or "v". After 10 minutes I was seeing double!

[Ed Hawco]

And yet, there is hope: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/15/style/teens-social-media.html

[Richard Tugwell]

This resonates quite a bit with me. Here are some thoughts.

A few years ago I sat an invigilated exam with the Open University (UK) where I had to write an essay. Although I'm your age, the last time I had written anything was a postcard. I found it very difficult - and it made me determined to physically write stuff on a regular basis

I currently work with a guy (in IT) who makes notes in a notebook. He has the most beautiful copperplate script I have ever seen. I'm humbled and jealous and aspire to do the same

In an earlier life I did a lot of mountaineering / hiking. I developed pretty good skills using a map and compass, and navigating in difficult situations (fog, mist, white-out etc). I'm still proud of these skills and of course they can be life-saving if your phone dies!

Let's not lose skills just because they seem irrelevant to our modern daily life

[RichardG]

Here's John McWhorter (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/13/opinion/teaching-cursive-handwriting.html?searchResultPosition=1) in The NY Times telling us why we don't need and shouldn't teach cursive writing anymore.

We are constantly leaving old technologies, crafts, skills and knowledge behind. It was de rigueur in the 17th, 18th and even the 19th centuries for a well-educated person to know ancient Greek and Latin. Not so much anymore.

[darlene]

I had to go back and look for it and then immediately saw it."

My son was born during the Generation Y era and can read and write cursive. He went to Catholic school because I wanted him to learn math the old fashion way with paper and pencil first, then by calculator later. Penmanship started in his first-grade classroom, and by the end of that school year, he was writing his first and last name in cursive, and the little guy was proud of it.

I hardly ever write in cursive because I was forced in third grade (school changed from S. Calif -> S. Jersey) to switch from left-hand to right-hand writing; it ruined my natural flow. 95% of what I write is printed as if the caps key was left on, and it all shifts to the left. People have said throughout my life I write like an architect, whatever that means. :(
My right-hand fatigues pretty fast when I write anything, so I am a keyboarder. I understand the importance of personal handwritten letters, and I try, but I am not always successful because my writing hand pains me.

My Rip van Winkle moment arrived when a classroom of young adults I taught did not know who Leonard Cohen was and a few other singers/musicians. We planned a classroom party for our graduates, and it all came up when they asked to look through my digital music library. After that experience, I felt it was time to sit back in the student's seat, observe how my perspective of the world has changed, and learn what the younger generations contribute.

[DavidB]

Trying to sign my name in cursive with my finger on credit card signature pads is always amusing. Sometimes it works; often it does not. I have to resort to primitive non-cursive strokes that look nothing like my signature.

[Andy F]

The thing that bothers me about the analogue clock thing is the implication that a digital time display is obviously better.

It’s not, any more than a table of percentages is better than a pie chart. Humans are visual animals, and a visual indication of the time is more suited to how we process things.

[David Brown]

I remember back in the 70’s I was an early adopter of digital watches, but it didn’t take long to discover their major limitation. A digital timepiece gives you one discreet bit of information: what time it is now. A traditional clock face gives you a graphical representation of time; you can see what time it is now in relation to other points in time, and that’s useful information. I will say that I think we make it difficult for anyone to learn to read a clock by sticking to our archaic system of hours and minutes. Maybe someday someone will recommend a base 10 system that is easy for people to learn.

I’m on the text side of the text/video divide. It comes down to practicality. Text has three things going for it that video lacks. The first is random access. It is very easy to find the information I need in a book, as opposed to a video (aren’t indexes wonderful things?). The second and probably most important is information density. I can read must faster than I can watch a video, given identical subject matter. And third, there is retention. It’s a personal thing, but I retain information much better if I’ve read something than if I’ve watched a video.

Finally, in regards to the 12 iconic people “test”, I really couldn’t care less. Perhaps the most irksome trend of the internet era is how the whole “celebrity” thing has spiraled out of control. There are certainly those who we should celebrate (Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, MLK) but as of late we have people who are famous only for being famous. I started reading newspapers (Mike please explain to your younger readers) in the early seventies, and I continue to this day. Back in the day, the articles were about WHAT happened whereas today they are primarily about WHO did it. I’m starting to sound like a curmudgeon now, so I’ll stop.

db

[Henning]

At some point, all of us and our precepts get left behind.

About 30 years ago, I was outside in front of our open garage. A neighbour boy came over and asked to use our phone, and I directed him to the one just inside our garage. It was an old phone, as I didn't feel the need to have a new one in a seldom used location. He looked at it and asked 'How do you use this?', as it was a black desk phone with a dial.

[Albert Smith]

"...whether they find it more efficient and comfortable to ingest information as video or text,..."

Put me in the text (print) category. I am voracious in reading articles where they do comparisons, (watches, lenses, martial arts, etc...), but I loathe YouTube videos that do the same. Videos are chronologically linear, text can be flipped back and forth to extract the information, really great when doing any A vs. B research. I get to the end of a 15 minute video and don't remember what was discussed in minute three. With printed articles I can skip the fluff and get to the need-to-know data.

[Mel]

I'm with you - can read faster than people can talk. The only videos I look for are those that teach me how to repair my computer equipment!

There are a few websites with videos I do appreciate - those with transcripts. Skip the video and read.

Guess we'll devolve back to heiroglyphics. Hey, worked for a few thousand years for the Eqyptians!

[Frank Gorga]

Hmmm...I noticed the 'typo' right away, but classified it a yet another example of really bad grammar so common these days.

As for the ability to read or write cursive hand writing, guess that I was well ahead of the curve. I abandoned cursive writing in middle school (back in the late 60s) when it was no longer forced upon us. My cursive handwriting was always very poor.

I learned decades later that, at least some of my troubles in this regard stemmed from the fact that I am left handed and that they only taught cursive for right handed folks.

Also, when I was in middle school, it was common to have boys learn 'drafting' (i.e. drawing of engineering plans) and girls learn typing. Using a technical pen as a left-hander was an 'interesting' experience. I don't believe that I ever produced a drawing that was smudge free!

Furthermore, my lack of typing skills has never been a problem. As computers/word processors became common, I learned to draft text while sitting at the keyboard. My thought processes are always the rate-limiting step, not how fast I am able to type; my two-finger typing keeps up easily with my brain.

With regard to youngsters telling time, my offspring are now nearly forty. Back when they were in middle school, I had a similar experience. The kids were in the family room where there was a perfectly serviceable analog clock upon the mantel. Yet when they wanted to know what time it was, one of them rose from the sofa and walked to the kitchen to see the time on the digital clock built in to the stove. They had certainly learned to read an analog clock but were just too lazy to bother. I guess that they had learned but the skill was not second nature to them.

My solution was to put gaffers tape over every digital clock in the house. There were many! The taped stayed on for more than a year if I remember correctly.

This state of affairs regarding analog clocks must be interesting when we old folks use the terms "clockwise" and "counter clockwise"!

[David Zalaznik]

I am old enough to remember comedian George Gobel on Johnny Carson and my favorite sentence from him. "The world is a tuxedo and I am a pair of brown shoes."

[Keith Cartmell]

I prefer text. You mentioned some of the reasons already, no need to repeat them. But the specific thing that's easy with text, when you already know something on the subject, and need to know more, is to zoom along as the text aligns to what you already know, and stopping at the point your knowledge stops. Then settle in and read carefully. It's easy to go back as much as you need. Some people like making notes in the margin. Books usually have a table of contents, and the useful ones usually have an index. Videos are only just beginning to have something that crudely resembles a table of contents.

I can read far quicker than people talk in a video, and most of them take forever to get to the point, with pointless diversions along the way. It's infuriating.

And the book is almost always better than the movie, especially if it's a good book.

Some content only exists on video. Sigh.

[David Brown]

Oh, Lord, don't get me started ...

[Steve Renwick]

Ray Bradbury was right. Everyone remembers "Fahrenheit 451" because of the book burning, but there was a great deal more in there.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

I see it as the text / streaming divide. As far back as the very late 1970s I found training courses for work on cassette tapes to be slow and boring. I found that by playing them double-speed, which doubled the data rate, plus the brain-power it took to figure out what they were saying shifted up an octave (because this real, analog, cassette player couldn't shift the tones back down the way digital players do today) managed to keep my attention long enough to get through the course. Text I would have gone through much faster and learned more from.

Am I in charge, or is the presenter? I like it better when I am :-) .

[robert e]

I dunno. Seems to me like the video generation do an awful lot of texting.

[Malcolm Myers]

I have been surprised to learn over recent years that joined-up handwriting (cursive) is not taught as standard in the USA. In the UK it is standard. However, my handwriting was never that neat and lack of practice as a result of using a keyboard has made it even worse. I wish I wrote neatly. Perhaps that should be my goal for 2023.

[Luke]

An analog clock IS a math problem. One can memorize the relative positions of the hands and quickly get a sense of the relative time, but at its heart it's still a math problem.

Of course, this relativity can be an advantage, like seeing proportions on a slide rule instead of just digits on a calculator.

[Dave Millier]

50 books a year? You are slacking. My 16 year old daughter (who is also a print published young author and a keen fan fiction author with 310,000 words to her name this year) says she reads 400 page novels in about 2 hours. I always thought I was a dedicated reader but she outclasses me.

Typically I read fiction at a rate of about a book every day or two days. All the time. Currently I am reading John Meaney's Ragnarok trilogy (for the 3rd time,my preferred authors can't keep up) - I estimate I will read the whole thing in 3 days. Not everyone takes to reading - one of my sisters doesn't own a single book, but some bookworms become so captured by fictional worlds it's basically what they do :-)

Cursive handwriting is still taught as standard in British primary schools, as is the traditional clock face.

Video is ok, but it is such a slow way to convey information. I do MOOC courses and subscribe to a number of YT photography channels but I have to watch at 1.5x or 1.75x to make it bearable. All those silent gaps, and umms and ers are excruciating. And American creators tend to speak slower than British for some reason I don't understand.

[James]

Here is an observation.

https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/liberals-read-conservatives-watch

And this was when the author considered himself on team conservative! Recently he wrote a piece where he said explicitly that he is disenchanted with the conservatives, but how do you read this article and not conclude he had already gone very far in that direction already by late last year.

Also re: cursive. What killed cursive was the ball point pen. You have to press on the paper quite hard to get it to write. Your illustration of "chicken scratch" was certainly done with a fountain pen. The Atlantic had an article saying this. And when I write with a fountain pen, I can deal with writing cursive. With a ball point or gel pen, forget it. Even so, my signature is more flourish than letters. It is so much so that the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission tried to get me to redo my signature (doing the registration part).

And for maps. Once I asked a friend if they knew how to read a highway map. So we were driving along and I asked how many kilometers until such and such place (this was in Nova Scotia a decade ago, it was a free tourist map, and we had it because I guessed right that reception would be hard to come by). No idea. They didn't know how to read a map.

[robert e]

The informed debunking by readers in the comments to McWhorter's anti-cursive screed in the Times is more valuable than the piece itself, which is little more than personal axe-grinding serving as click bait.

[richardp-london]

Telling the time from a clock's hands:
see the Irish comedian Dave Allen on this.

[Bill Tyler]

David Brown wrote, "...our archaic system of hours and minutes..." That division of things into 60ths or multiples of 60 goes all the way back to ancient Babylon, and even before that to Sumeria. We also divide circles into a multiple of 60 degrees (6 times 60 is 360) and there are roughly 360 days in a year. Latitude and longitude, until recently, were always given in degrees, minutes, and seconds of arc, with a minute equaling 1/60 of a degree and an arc-second equaling 1/60 of a minute. A minute of latitude (or, at the equator, longitude) is just a little over a mile. More recently, people have started using decimal degrees and forgoing minutes and seconds. But that number 60 is deeply entrenched. France tried a decimal time system during the revolutionary period, but it died out quickly. Good luck getting 60 out of our time measurements.

[Nick]

As I've probably said before in this space, I vastly prefer text to video for information, since the efficiency difference for someone like me (a quick reader and master skimmer) is close to an order of magnitude. For entertainment, all media have their place; hell, I haven't read a book in years, but I've listened to hundreds of novels as audiobooks (while commuting, because efficiency), and that's more than enough to scratch my itch for long-form storytelling.