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Facebook Is Wrong, Text Is Deathless (kottke.org)
Facebook is seeming shifting its attention to video -- first by allowing people and publishers alike to upload videos on the social network, and then by Facebook Live, with which people are able to broadcast themselves to their friends and followers. Recently, an executive with the company said that Facebook will be probably all video in five years. "The best way to tell stories in this world, where so much information is coming at us, actually is video," Nicola Mendelsohn, who heads up Facebook's operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa said. "It conveys so much more information in a much quicker period. So actually the trend helps us to digest much more information." Tim Carmody, a reporter whose work has appeared on Wired, and The Verge among others, makes a strong case for texts, and why it is always going to be here. He writes: Text is surprisingly resilient. It's cheap, it's flexible, it's discreet. Human brains process it absurdly well considering there's nothing really built-in for it. Plenty of people can deal with text better than they can spoken language, whether as a matter of preference or necessity. And it's endlessly computable -- you can search it, code it. You can use text to make it do other things. In short, all of the same technological advances that enable more and more video, audio, and immersive VR entertainment also enable more and more text. We will see more of all of them as the technological bottlenecks open up. And text itself will get weirder, its properties less distinct, as it reflects new assumptions and possibilities borrowed from other tech and media. It already has! Text can be real-time, text can be ephemeral -- text has taken on almost all of the attributes we always used to distinguish speech, but it's still remained text. It's still visual characters registered by the eye standing in for (and shaping its own) language.
If you're reading text instead of watching someone talking, you're in mortal danger of paying attention to someone who isn't attractive . The horror.
This is true. But it's not just attractiveness. It's body language. It's the whole framing and presentation of the thing.
It's not by coincidence that when the ancient Roman Cicero, one of the greatest orators of all time, was killed by political enemies, they cut off his hands and nailed them to the place he gave his speeches. While some have interpreted this to be a way of punishing the "hands that wrote his speeches," it's likely that at least one reason (if not the primary one) was because of the role of gestures in the delivery of orations at the time. Without microphones in ancient Rome, speakers who wanted "those in the back" to understand them necessarily made use of formalized gesture to emphasize points and to enhance argument. (You see the same thing in stage actors when they use enhanced gestures without microphones today.) Ancient treatises on persuasive speaking repeatedly mention the importance of body language and gestures. As Quintilian wrote: "As for the hands, without which all action would be crippled and enfeebled, it is scarcely possible to describe the variety of their motions, since they are almost as expressive as words. For other portions of the body may help the speaker, whereas the hands may almost be said to speak."
Anyhow, this could all lead up to a silly joke about Italians who 'talk with their hands." But even if most modern methods of expression don't use these stylized body motions, good persuasive speakers are very familiar with how one's body language and movements can impact the reception of an argument.
And whether you're dealing with audio or video, the SOUND of a speaker is critical in conveying meaning and tone (as we all know from that time we sent an email which was grossly misinterpreted).
TL;DR -- Video (or real-life speaking, for that matter) has the potential for MUCH greater manipulation of viewers than text. Politicians have known this and have exploited it for millennia. Even an ancient Roman could have told you that text was useful for serious study and critique, whereas oratory was all about manipulation of your audience.