Post: #1

They say a pic is worth a thousand words. In this era of multimedia being widely available and a multitude of learning apps with video and voice, if all things are fair, is the skillset of knowing how to read still useful?

My question is, if you could always substitute important information that is normally presented as words by a movie or obvious image to explain it, does that make the art of reading obsolete?

I work with a lot of IT applications and I still enjoy reading paper novels but the advent of multimedia these days are amazing. Topics that I found boring in the past have been recoined in so many ways that I can easily see it as enjoyable. For kids these days, learning must be a joy compared to the days of going to the library and looking for encyclopedias only to hope it is comprehensive enough.

Post: #2

No, reading is far superior to movies in my experience. A book can give you so much more information than a movie.

But it depends on the subject. I love reading books on history, but learning the stock market is far superior in video tutorial format, stock market being highly visual form of skill. (candles and such.)

Post: #3

(10-24-2014 03:08 AM)Glaucon Wrote:  No, reading is far superior to movies in my experience. A book can give you so much more information than a movie.

But it depends on the subject. I love reading books on history, but learning the stock market is far superior in video tutorial format, stock market being highly visual form of skill. (candles and such.)

You only say the book gives you more information IF the movie is badly directed and not totally inclusive. But if you are watching a movie, at least two of your senses are being directly influenced as opposed to one (sense of sight and auditory). Now if you throw in the fact that colours and hues can be used in movies to add to information provided through visual output, wouldn't you say that a movie makes a very strong case against reading?

Post: #4

I like videos based on the fact that you can do much more with it than a book.

Books are becoming static because yeah you can see words on how to do something, but visually being able to see it in motion helps. If you've ever tried reading a photoshop tutorial on how to do something trust me it's not easy. Might as well see what's going on vs getting stuck at a point and being fucked.

Books is cool, but sometimes the authors can get out of fucking hand.
People who teach lessons in video do the best they can to make it easy for you to understand. Authors who got like 40 PhDs don't give a fuck if you understand them or not.

A good site to learn through video is:
http://www.udemy.com

Post: #5

On this whole topic of reading I recommend Sven Birkert's The Gutenberg Elegies and what is special about the act of opening a book.

Post: #6

(10-24-2014 03:03 AM)Moma Wrote:  My question is, if you could always substitute important information that is normally presented as words by a movie or obvious image to explain it, does that make the art of reading obsolete?

Not at all...learning is a matter of acquiring information and analyses, which can be done through reading arguably better than more dynamic media. Reading might be drier but there's no doubting its value, it may be more demanding but it's also more rewarding. I'd say they best complement each other:

Movies have the advantage of being able to present a more vivid and intimate (and thereby more accessible) image of the subject at hand: footage of an historical event, reenactments, graphic illustrations of scientific theories and so on can bring subjects alive, making it an extraordinarily valuable educational tool.

Books, however, are far more adept at presenting in-depth analyses and interpretations...a movie that tries to explore and contrast various viewpoints to the same extent back to back would get very tiring, meaning that the medium's own dynamism would begin working against it because the pace it requires (or at least the pace that audiences are accustomed to) makes difficult deeper consideration. In addition, books are objectively superior at conveying philosophical, literary and non-fictional information because movies are necessarily truncated in comparison...even when short novels are adapted to movie form a good deal of substance gets cut out, so just imagine what a fool's errand it would be if a filmmaker tried to adapt the entirety of "In Search of Lost Time" or some thick history book.

I don't doubt that a man who only watched well-made documentaries (there are enough to detain anyone for a very long time) would become quite knowledgeable and erudite with the material therein. At the same time, I personally think a man who read a great deal of good books would probably show a much more nuanced understanding and richer knowledge of the subjects covered. With that in mind, I think reading augmented with other media and with discussion (a vital form of intellectual development that too often goes neglected) is the best way to go.

Post: #7

I think reading is not only a viable method of learning but the best.
-It demands concentration and engagement with the subject to finish a book, find what facts, arguments or info you particularly need and remember them to apply in your life. Video can disseminate ideas more widely, but it's not the last word-there's always background reading to do for a lecture. Videos also don't stimulate growth of neural connections in the same ways as reading.

-It (probably) takes much more rigour to produce a book than an ebook, simply because a medium that's not malleable, like a printed book, is harder to edit or alter once published. I've worked as a proofreader, and one standout thing I noticed is that books which are sold as paper-and-ink have far fewer mistakes than books that are going to be published on Kindle or similar platforms, even as a first proof (i.e. the text before it's sent to an editor). I don't think this is a coincidence: if there has to be a fact-checker, editor, lawyer and proofreader involved, the end result is probably more accurate, engaging and stylistically appropriate. In other words, more effort goes into a book when the writer knows he has to get it right first time.

-Multimedia isn't necessarily bad but it encourages reading around a subject-for me, even Microsoft Encarta wasn't as good for homework as an encyclopedia at the public library. Wikipedia is used by undergraduates to look up book summaries rather than them reading the work-not just because they're lazy although that plays a part, but because they've grown used to absorbing information in small, rapid amounts. If a book is a three-course meal of substantial dishes, multimedia is like Chinese food: lots or little courses that leave you hungry again an hour later.

-Multimedia is too much used for entertainment that people treat learning through it as entertainment as well. There's no feeling of completion when you read a wiki page as there is when finishing a book-you click a hyperlink, and another and another.

Check out Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows" for more on this

Post: #8

I personally think that if you truly want to become an expert on a topic, you need to read (an awful lot) about it. In my opinion, books offer much more depth, than a youtube video or a smartphone app. Of course if you want to "understand" the theory of relativity, for example. A 3 minutes video may do a fine job, since it´s much more visual. But it´s also much more superficial. If you are a physicist or are really interested in understanding the whole framework behind it, you have to submerge yourself in all the scientific literature, that has been written about it.

I also fear that today´s youth is being dumbed down by all the obsession with the easy consumption media. The short attention span of average millennials is worrisome.

Post: #9

So you think the rate of presentation has to do with quality and effectiveness (long lasting) of consumption? What about the era before reading and writing when tales were passed by griots via spoken word? Don't you think the art of scribing was an evolution of that and hence multimedia being an evolution of scribing?
Also the example of 3 min YouTube vid is not valid here. You can find small books that are shyt too. I'm saying in all fairness if you got information and had to deliver it to an audience of well rounded humans (not a bunch of brain roasted social media teens) which medium would convey that information in the best fashion? Without bias.

Post: #10

I'm more of a visual learner myself, but I'm always open to reading a book to indulge myself in any great author's writings. Helps improve my diction.

Post: #11

Obviously, reading is still a viable method of learning. It always has been and always will be. That said, although I think that the written word is perhaps mankind's greatest invention, I think its importance is often over-stated. As such, I'd like to put forward the case against reading as the best method of learning, if only to play devil's advocate to the number of people who will sing, and have already sung, its praises.

1. Except where there has been a genetic issue, disease, trauma or some form of extreme deprivation, humans have all evolved to see and hear, and also to achieve fluency in at least one spoken language. Whilst they might also learn to read, they did not evolve to read (in the same way that they did not evolve to play tennis or be able to fix an engine). As such, any form of learning that draws on the non-literary visual and auditory will be much more effective as a method of learning except in highly theoretical situations (and I do mean highly theoretical, as per my next point).

2. Many extremely complex endeavours -- from large and complex architectural and engineering projects to oceanic travel to extremely long poems -- have been carried out by people who were illiterate or semi-literate at best. Literacy does not seem to be a pre-condition for such endeavours. In fact, at times, it may be a hindrance. We've all known people who were unbelievably book smart, but who couldn't build a fence that was straight or be trusted to go down the street and come back with the right materials and the right change in order to do so. The Taiwanese educational system produces them in droves.

3. Literacy is not even necessarily a pre-condition for knowing a lot of stuff (as opposed to being able to do stuff). Most pre-literate societies were composed of people with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the physical world around them, particularly in the fields of zoology and botany.

4. Children learn an enormous amount when they are pre-literate. Nowhere is this clearer than with their first language. A five year old child probably has a larger vocabulary and more natural use of grammar than all but the most expert of professors who learnt the same language as an adult, and very little to none of that fluency was achieved through book learning.

I have been teaching English on and off in Taiwan for more than seven years. The Taiwanese are obsessed with book learning. To behold a Taiwanese English class taught by a Taiwanese English teacher is to observe an advanced linguistics lecture, with the blackboard covered with what might as well be a 15th century alchemy text to the average native English speaker. Most of them could pick out all of the conjunctions, prepositions or adverbs in this post. They memorise all sorts of obscure words. Yet they can't use any of it. They routinely screw up verb conjugations, plurals, articles (a/an/the) and use of prepositions that most children in the U.S., U.K., etc. would not. Furthermore, if you were to ask many/most of them (including teachers!) what they did on the weekend, their hobbies, what they do for a job, etc., you'd be met with something between bewilderment and abject terror. If there is ever a case to be made against book learning, it has to be East Asia. Being here and teaching here has radically changed my philosophy of what learning is and should be.

5. Further to that, even in the Anglosphere, most language classes are very heavy on reading and writing, and yet the average person graduates high school with an absolutely atrocious level of proficiency in a foreign language. I studied French for six years at school and wrote essays on French politics for which I supposedly received high grades. Yet if you'd asked me to use any of it a year out of high school (let alone now!) or actually in France, I'd have been completely useless.

6. As I have noted so far, most of humanity, for most of its history, has been pre-literate. Even amongst societies that did have highly advanced literature, there was still not nearly as much exposure to the written word as there is in today's world. We are literally bombarded by writing on a daily basis. Yet here is something curious. Basically, after analysing the State of the Union addresses for all presidents, it has been found that the complexity of those speeches has declined steadily over time, with very slight upticks now and then, before the downward trajectory has resumed. So, although we live in a time when people spend more time in school and are exposed to more of the written word than ever before, even beyond school, there has been a simultaneous dumbing down of the language. There may be many reasons for it, chief amongst them that in some sense, the franchise of reading has been expanding to progressively less intelligent people, but it is still a curious trend. It does show that in at least one way, all of that book learning and reading has not necessarily made people any smarter.

Post: #12

(10-24-2014 07:25 AM)Moma Wrote:  So you think the rate of presentation has to do with quality and effectiveness (long lasting) of consumption? What about the era before reading and writing when tales were passed by griots via spoken word? Don't you think the art of scribing was an evolution of that and hence multimedia being an evolution of scribing?
Also the example of 3 min YouTube vid is not valid here. You can find small books that are shyt too. I'm saying in all fairness if you got information and had to deliver it to an audience of well rounded humans (not a bunch of brain roasted social media teens) which medium would convey that information in the best fashion? Without bias.

Let me put it this way. Could you become a modern (take into consideration all the new knowledge being discovered, in the last three centuries. We aren´t living in ancient Rome anymore)engineer, an architect, a physicist, a historian or a medic without reading and studying textbooks? Only with the help of movies or videos? I don´t think so.

Post: #13

Freeuser, I say yes you can. If the director of the multimedia was proficient enough and not a lazy hack (which can easily be said of authors as I have read absolute shyte literature in my ventures).
With that in all, I think multimedia can make an extremely strong case to replace the written word as the most efficient form of acquiring information.

Post: #14

The written word is one of the hallmarks of civilization. Without it, there is no civilization and no cultural achievement.

Post: #15

Is pussy still a viable way of busting your nut?

Post: #16

Think about the forum we're on, then think about that question.

You can't make a picture, podcast, or video for everything in life.

Post: #17

Reading is incredibly important, but much like pussy you have to start with a quality source. Just because you're busting your educational nut does not make you more enlightened.

Post: #18

Reading is far superior. It's not even a question.

Neil Postman wrote an entire book about it called Amusing Ourselves to Death. Think about the mental focus required to read a 500-page book versus watching moving pictures on a projection screen.

" For kids these days, learning must be a joy compared to the days of going to the library and looking for encyclopedias only to hope it is comprehensive enough."

That's not a good thing. Education nowadays is all about entertainment; check out ratemyprofessor.com, where COLLEGE kids are complaining that professors are "too boring" or "monotone". Many of these fucktards can't even string a proper sentence together after 4 years of "intensive" education.

You can't possibly be serious.

Post: #19

You lot keep reiterating subjective views and referring to dulltards that would fail their classes whether it was through books or not. Might be best to use students from countries with a higher gross IQ as an example of what works going forth instead of a group of Valley High pinheads. The poster who mentioned the book smart Taiwanese raised an interesting point. The best form of learning is when it is fun and engaging. Just because something is hard or difficult to do doesn't make it more effective . The same goes for something easy. Just because it's fun does not diminish the effectiveness. Right now we are looking at the most effective not the most nostalgic.

Rosca aka r-smoov might be a good example of an opinion to consider as he is of the new multimedia generation. Again, my question is, in all fairness at full leverage ,is multimedia a more advanced learning platform than books? Words are put together to form images in our head. Multimedia is already in image/video form. Compare it to drinking vegetable juice as opposed to eating the vegetables. If fibre intake is already optimal then the body accepts nutrients in the liquid form more efficiently since it doesn't need to expand energy to break it down.
Multimedia is like a liquid novel. It is in the state that the novel is trying to get us to, that of imagery. Geniuses are able to process things rapidly and get it to the imagery stage quickest.

We are at the fastest and most optimal stage when we are children and how do children prefer to learn something they cannot touch? They prefer to see it. Give a child a choice between a comprehensive book and a comprehensive cartoon, what do they choose?
They choose the cartoon.

Post: #20

Depends on the subject.

In most endeavors a man can't achieve competency from reading alone.

Body Building?
Cooking?
Game?

I have a hard time of thinking something that you can only learn through reading.

WIA

Post: #21

I often find learning through listening and/or watching (going right back to class room lessons in school and university) to be slow and inefficient compared to reading books or articles that cover the same material (assuming a scenario where you have both methods ready to go and don't have to go searching for additional sources, or have to search for equal amounts of time).

Speaking subjectively here (yes, I know you didn't want that, but I'm going to do it anyway), my learning retention and concentration is almost always significantly higher when reading than when listening (with or without images, video or live performance).
And if I try to apply that a bit more objectively, depending on the topic and the importance of comprehensive recollection and understanding, repetition will often be needed, and with eg. a video you would then need to a) mark important points, b) take written or spoken notes while watching the video for the first time, or c) potentially waste significant amounts of time scanning through the video for segments that need repeating, and possibly needing to watch additional surrounding minutes because a spoken presentation is often less concise than a written one.

On a slightly related note, when blog writers sometimes start cutting back on their written posts in favour of YouTube videos or podcasts, I'll quite frequently take a pass until their next written article. Assuming they are both compelling writers and reasonably entertaining to watch live talking about the same topic, I still feel (and this is probably largely subjective) that it's often excruciatingly inefficient and regularly more or less boring for me to have to watch that video instead of reading the same material.
So unless there's a clear advantage to both showing and telling - instead of just doing a monologue for the camera - I'll take that written article/blog post/book.

Post: #22

Even far superior to reading, is reading and writing.

Post: #23

I think reading is the best way because you can pace yourself however you like. If you have a 5 hour video, unless you know the time-stamps you kinda have to sit through that entire beats, whereas a 90 page book can be knocked out quickly if you're a champ. Also, I think reading is a form of information processing that forces you to be active (to a certain extent).

Post: #24

On balance I feel reading is far more active than watching. It requires that you use your mind to build an image of what is being described, much like the difference between listening to instrumental music (I'm thinking specifically of jazz or classical music) and lyrical music.

The active engagement of the imagination means that you clarify the concept in your mind first - how else could you imagine it?

However this is not always the case. Some people will read without engagement, often just to feel good about getting through the pages. On the other hand, some people will pause lectures and take active notes. So both can be either active or passive, but it is harder to be a passive reader than it is to be a passive watcher.

Post: #25

(10-25-2014 05:18 AM)Al Sahab Wrote:  On balance I feel reading is far more active than watching. It requires that you use your mind to build an image of what is being described, much like the difference between listening to instrumental music (I'm thinking specifically of jazz or classical music) and lyrical music.

The active engagement of the imagination means that you clarify the concept in your mind first - how else could you imagine it?

However this is not always the case. Some people will read without engagement, often just to feel good about getting through the pages. On the other hand, some people will pause lectures and take active notes. So both can be either active or passive, but it is harder to be a passive reader than it is to be a passive watcher.

This concept you mention is very interesting and sheds light on this topic.