[walleeee]

> Text is much more informationally dense than audiovisual multimedia.

This has it backwards. Audiovisual multimedia have far higher raw bandwidth than text. I agree with your (implied) point, though, that text remains the preferred medium for technical use cases like programming for good reason: humans can't parse a firehose of audiovisual stimuli into precise mental constructs.

Text's typically linear structure and low information density are precisely why it has yet to be superseded, I think.

[zepto]

You are talking about bandwidth as if it was the same as information density.

I think the parent is taking about information as defined by Shannon. Essentially referring to entropy.

By that definition text is far more dense than AV.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)

[walleeee]

I stand corrected; on this view text has more entropy due to limitations of our visual system and working memory (i.e., the encoding), no? We're pretty good at hashing short symbol strings to referents. If we could decode a grayscale image with the same precision, visual media would have higher entropy.