[pkoird]

So people (unless they have aphantasia) immerse themselves in whatever they are reading and conjure up imaginations of the world that the fictional novel is portraying, right? If you think about it, what people read is essentially symbols of certain optical structure and you could argue that runes (in the traditional sense) are not much different as well! So yeah, writing can comfortably be thought of just runes that makes people hallucinate.

[Biologist123]

It’s certainly an enchanting explanation. Of course some act on those hallucinations as if they were spellbound - and the Capitol riots had a definite feel of tweet-induced chaos. Interesting idea.