Slashdot Mirror
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.
I'll believe text is dead when facebook replaces their logo with a video. And not a video *of* text. In the meantime, there's lots of text on facebook, whether they like it or not.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
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.
Consider what kind of people make the majority of facebook. They surely don't slashdot.
The narcissist's toolbox
"Print is dead."
RIP Egon
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Ms Mendelsohn,
What you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
It's quicker to consume text than video. Just an FYI
Note: Unabashed repost from yesterday because that was the stupidest thing I'd heard all day and work had a Trump segment on in the background
Of course text are deathless. This debacle make me remember when TV appeared and everyone were foreseeing the death of the radio. Well guess what? It's still there and it'll be remain for a long, long time because it's main flaw it's also it's biggest strength : It have no screen. There's time where you just want to listen while your eye can do something else.
In this case, it's more or less the same thing where with text. More and more people use their cellphone for social media and most of the time you just want to use it without sound and just want to read quick social update.
Elok
The real motivation behind Facebook's push toward video are ads. It is too easy to filter and ignore banner ads from text communication, it is much harder tasks to filter commercials from the video stream.
So here you go, this isn't philosophical debate about the future of communications - it is classical foot-in-the-door technique in a move toward streaming video commercials to Facebook users.
It's truly amazing to me what an ivory tower Silicon Valley has become. Seems like everybody there assumes that everyone has blazing fast internet that is SYMMETRICAL!!! Sorry, but lack of symmetry is one reason why using the cloud for everything fails. That and speeds that most people are willing to pay for pales in comparison to what Silicon Valley likely averages. Further, they assume that everyone has that kind of speed wherever they go which to them means from the hipster coffee bar, to their fancy-shmancy all-expense-paid offices, to their hipster clubs, to their trendy loft apartment. Newsflash, people, there is a big world out there and it doesn't have 4G access.
I guess that is one reason I like Slashdot.
I dislike the video content on CNN.com. I don't need a video of a reporter reading a story. I can read myself. In general would rather read a story and see a high-quality still picture than a tiny compress video.
Don't get me started on pictures or videos of text.
-Charles
Forums would be useless with video clip posts. Just look at a typical forum thread: it can have several hundred posts. It'd take you hours and hours to watch them all, but in text form you can skim through them in minutes.
TFA does make a nice point about how well our human brains work with text, especially considering that text is not a natural thing that we were evolved to read. We can process textual information absurdly quickly.
"Video will give us more revenue. Therefore, we're killing text. We'll try anyway."
The word is the only system of encoding thoughts—the only medium—that refuses to dissolve in the devouring torrent of electronic media.
—Neal Stephenson, In The Beginning Was The Command Line
With video, you can tell immediately whether the speaker is attractive or not, and ignore the ones who aren't. 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.
No. Smartphones and tablets don't have physical keyboards because there's no room for them. As you yourself note, they come with whatever means to enter text the constraints of the form factor permits built-in. That they happen to have cameras is irrelevant.
Text is never going anywhere because with text, if I want to convey the idea of eleventy billion universes exploding and turning into butterflies I just did, whereas with any other medium how would you even begin?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.