I think most people just find it easy to put a podcast and pay semi-attention on while they do tasks or go on their phone. And the education sector is having to adapt to that and make it possible for students to achieve good grades by learning like that.
</old man yells at cloud>
Also I found videos to be of enormous value to learn visual tools like CAD. Just watching someone do the job and explaining how they do it lets you fill the gaps that theoretical education leaves open.
Not just the critical part described in an article
In 1400, actually reading books deeply was for autistic weirdos who were usually sent to monasteries. In 1950, you could actually mention reading literary fiction on a job interview and it would help, rather than hurt, you. In 2024, actually reading books deeply is for autistic weirdos again and “well-adjusted” people realize that their ability to afford food and housing relies on the use of information to form a collage beneficial to one’s personal image—not deep understanding of high-quality information, and certainly not the high-risk generation of anything new.
It makes me kinda sad. Videogames need voice acting now to become successful because nobody has the reading or concentration skills. When I was a child I taught myself English by playing Planescape Torment.
E.g watching developer write software can show you things about OS usage, IDE usage, automation and other tricks and habbits
"A moment" in a video is exactly that, a moment of time, either a frame or a couple of seconds that will stay in short term memory.
"A moment" in a text is a page or two facing pages. There can be diagrams or formulas there. It is extremely easy to direct attention to parts of these pages, in any order.
In a video, "moments" in the above sense are generally low information, quickly changing in linear order. In a text, they are fewer and of higher density. It seems that the second type is easier to commit to long-term memory, to understand, etc.
Or constant stream of information gives them the illusion of staying informed
Video games seem to be aiming to inspire strong emotion through realism, not writing. I won’t say the quality of the writing doesn’t matter but it’s not what makes a great game. Final fantasy games have really hackneyed plots and writing but do the game part extremely well. And video games are the best way to make a story accessible to a large number of people. I don’t think the written word puts a story into the center of a culture anymore.
The voice acting probably adds realism and accessibility but I agree that it also takes something away, just as no video game can do, intellectually and emotionally, what the written word can do. The fact that mere text had such an effect is part of the artifact. Sadly, I don’t how you tell teenagers, if you’re teaching language and literature, that people had the same strong emotional reactions to these texts we assign, that they have to video games.
Oddly enough I’m reading a fantasy novel right now by someone who used to be part of this community. It’s far better than I expected it to be, and it’s causing me to rethink a number of recent events I thought I understood.
Oh, also in another media from the same era and the same country : Neon Genesis Evangelion (which I only discovered this year and which hit harder than I expected). And it has a lot of Kabbalah symbolism in it ! Why ? The lead author basically says because it was exotic and cool... (I only now put two and two together for Sephiroth, but then I barely thought of him for the last couple of decades...)
Also, "podcasts" go quite a bit back : since it became practical to record radio (wire already, or did that only start with cassette tapes ?)
TV got that too with it's own tapes, but the portability and diversity was much worse until digital video got cheap enough.