[rgifford]

> I liked the way Ray Bradbury writes about this in Fahrenheit 451. When you read books, you have time to think about it, re-read it and question it. Whereas while watching video, things move so fast that the decision is made up for you.

You can literally watch a video at any pace you want.

I don't get romanticism around books and I can't help but eye roll when someone a) gushes about reading or b) waxes poetic about the past.

We have access to nearly every book, article, paper, video, song, etc. ever written or recorded within seconds. When I want to learn, the most efficient path is usually not through a single author. Why should it be? Why is it bad if we predominantly piece together information through multimedia? I don't get this article or the "reading club" mentality at all. Though I often hear it come out at parties as virtue signal.

[TuringTest]

> You can literally watch a video at any pace you want.

True in a literal sense, but irrelevant.

In order to change the pace a video, you need to actively interact with the video player; it's hard or impossible to get into a state of flow[1] if you need to constantly press buttons to pause, skip or replay parts of the video, change its speed, or find the specific second you want to analyze.

This affects the depth of reasoning about the concepts you're getting from the media. In a written text, you can naturally pause and reflect upon a paragraph, or re-read recent paragraphs only by moving the eyes up, slowing down at particularly difficult or interesting sections.

This state of mind of "intense mental concentration" when reading is a good basis for learning and reflection, and can be combined a more powerful range of options when reading; with video you can also get into that state, but then the video moves forward uniformly, and the pace at which you're confronted with the concepts is defined by the media, not your mental processes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

[goldfeld]

Maybe you just represent (echo) the hubris of the new century? The past doesn't need any more romanticising or contemporary poetry than it needs new Mozarts, Shakespeares, Balzacs and Einsteins, whereas the twenty-first century is in dire search of true genius, for all the torrent of information being churned and churned. The ratio of intelligent study decays as the numbers of daily YouTube views sharply rise. It astounds me that people really believe progress is being made on the habits of deep intellectual work with new gadgets.

[II2II]

Yes, consuming audio and video for information has improved in recent years. It is now practical to change the playback speed and return to a particular point using transcripts. While these tools are not universally available, they are certainly gaining traction for educational content. On the other hand, it is not quite the same as reading a text for the reasons described by TuringTest.

> We have access to nearly every book, article, paper, video, song, etc. ever written or recorded within seconds.

While I have some reservations about digital texts, I agree that the situation is far better than it was 30 years ago. I fear that many people have forgotten how long it used to take to find information in the past, never mind obtain it, never mind the financial cost.

As for those reservations, they are mostly the product of the digital environment that we have created and accepted. They have very little to do with access to access to or the nature of books. The article hinted at this when it mentioned greed. Common dedicated e-readers are designed to sell books as much as designed to read books. Most websites are designed to deliver advertising as much as delivering content. General purpose devices present a continuous stream of distractions that leave us victim to our own vices. It does not have to be that way, but it takes a proactive approach for it to be otherwise.

We would be better served if we acknowledged the shortcomings of electronic texts (as well as audio and video delivery) then took the initiative to address them.

[LamaOfRuin]

You need to read some literature. Information is not knowledge or understanding.

[rgifford]

Funny you say that, I was an English major for a brief while in college. I switched to a creative writing minor before the end of my first year.

For whatever it was my English professors had, it was my creative writing professors with real acclaim and ability.