And why this won’t change for a long time.

Many people these days make some variant of the following argument:

“The fact that there are plenty of really idiotic videos on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and other platforms does not mean that video itself is a dumb language, or media. The education of a really free person, who is really capable of self-determination passes also through video, not just reading books”

Of course! But…

Of course video also is a great very powerful, very deep media. Of course (and thank heavens, let me add!), real education is much more, and much more diverse, than just reading books.

In spite of this, certain arguments still ignore a couple of serious limits that “video” has.

The first one is the maybe unconscious assumptions behind the “only” part in “only through reading”.

Maybe two or three hundreds years from now things will be different, but today - and for at least a few more generations - the vast majority of human culture and knowledge that it is important to know is in text format.

Anyone who doesn’t read because they prefer video gives himself a much higher probability to understand little to nothing about where, how and why he lives, or at least to make a much bigger effort to get there.

All this is true also because, at least for the foreseeable future, text is immensely more reusable, “mixable” and analyzable than video, even automatically. In other words, it is immensely better suited to increase and share knowledge.

At a lower level, the real problem is perhaps the infamous habit of using video clips INSTEAD of text or images (*), when the latter would be infinitely more effective.

(*) of course, this is true also for audio messages instead of text ones!

Image source: A word is worth a thousand pictures