Just try to use words to describe either of these photos and see how they fall short:
https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2015-10/19/1...
https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2015-10/19/1...
Between recorded voice and written text, I personally prefer written language. I like the ability to consume at my own pace, go back and re-read tricky bits, and easily search or quote. Plus it's much easier to use TTS to convert text to speech than the other way around (at the moment). Maybe someday technology will remove this boundary but currently that's my stance.
I'll also add that well written prose has moved me (and many others) emotionally in more powerful ways than any photo ever has.
Your Great Depression era photo conveys emotions only because of the context around it - context I know primarily because of text. If I showed this photo to a relative of mine half way across the world, they would merely see an ordinary woman with two sleepy kids.
But that's true for text, too. The US just had a very major politicized event where two sides had two wildly different conclusions over what one man's words meant. And there's a grand legal tradition of taking one specific document and interpreting what its words mean and applying it to a plethora of situations. There's plenty of people that come to wildly different conclusions over what certain amendments do or do not mean.
Hell, look at literary analysis! You can give people a book like 1984, and some people will say in all confidence that it is explicitly anti-socialism, when the author said the literal opposite. And that's something with a supposedly clear ideological message, to say nothing of works with less concrete themes.
It's not really apples to apples of course. Steinbeck describes much more, but also takes much more time to consume. The point though is that it's possible to convey very complex emotional states in literature or poetry
Take using a computer to type a word versus draw a picture: Effectively everyone who uses a computer can type a word, but I'd bet less than 10% could draw a circle.
But put a piece of paper in front of someone and effectively everyone can draw a circle.
This points to there being a limitation in the technology for working with other forms of media, not the effectiveness of the communication medium itself.
This isn't to say that text isn't also a better communication medium, but it is to say, until the technology has improved for communicating with other media, it's difficult to compare without basing the decision on the limitations of the technology.
In other words, most of the perceived advantages of text are really advantages of text being easier to represent digitally (or generally reproduced, e.g., printing press), not advantages of text as a communication medium itself.
For the record, I came up with this thought, about computers and software being optimized for text, by realizing I learned the best by reading information presented as a combination of text and media (e.g., a textbook with diagrams), but when I communicate with a computer, I always just use text, why? Well, making media with a computer is a huge PITA, I'm assuming because you program the computer itself with text, so its entire interface seems optimized for that. (This is particularly interesting looking in contrast to smartphones and tablets, which are entirely not optimized for text.)
We have tons of tech now: audio, video, charting, etc.
Circles are pretty easy in powerpoint or any such software.
The tech is obviously here already.
But still, why do people prefer sending chat texts instead of calling or video calling? Surely not because of tech.
It turns out that people who are highly fluent in a language with a compact alphabet like English prefer sending text chats. My Chinese colleagues and friends routinely send many more voice chat messages than text because it is much more efficient than typing mandarin.
Also in India, I've observed that people fluent in vernacular but not in written English primarily send voice chat messages - again because the vernacular text input is very inefficient
So interestingly does my daughter who can type English text easily but as she always grew up in a world her parents and her friends parents had smartphones, she finds it a lot more comfortable to send voice chat messages.
The other benefit of chat is asynchronocity. You're not forcing the other party to do a context switch and signalling that they can get to ot.
To this day, this complexity is still mostly offloaded to users in the form of export settings, and supported playback formats. One basic requirement of the technology reaching the point good media support is if a user never encounters codecs, in either export settings or playback problems.
This isn't universally true. I (unfortunately, for me, since I hate it personally) know plenty of people who prefer voice or video calls. I even have people who will reply with voice recordings to my text messages.
Many people prefer voice or video.
I prefer text because of two main reasons:
1. Its asynchronous. I can reply as needed while not being disturbed if I happen to be in the middle of something.
2. Its not real time. That is, I can take my time to form my response. I can proof read, edit, clearly form my thoughts etc. In a voice/video recording, editing is difficult, in a live setting, I'm under more time pressure to finish my sentences rather than thinking about them more.
I don't prefer text because of technology reasons, except those that make text more asynchronous and easier to proof read and edit.
But many people I know or have interacted with hate text and prefer voice or video.
http://35.161.88.15/interactive/going-critical/
There is something about playing with the sliders and watching that plague die out and flare up, that makes the point with a vividness beyond words.
◯ ◯
◠On the other hand, many (technical/mathematical) concepts are more effectively explained using diagrams/images.
E.g. the very visual approach taken in Mathologer videos [1] makes difficult, esoteric, mathematical ideas accessible to a wider audience.
https://www.florence-nightingale.co.uk/coxcomb-diagram-1858/
E.g where does musical notation stand? For an untrained eye it is just a bunch of lines, dots and squiggles but others will read it like text and much more efficiently so than if it were written words.
Similarly the example about the Wikipedia text of human rights being supposedly impossible to convey via image. But what does the text convey to you if you don’t speak English?
Text is the written form of language. And language is defined as a sequence of symbols. Thus, text is a subset of diagrams. Arbitrary diagrams can be of any topology (e.g. DAGs or even have cycles), however text always is of sequential topology (or a hierarchy as there is an isomorphic mapping to sequences).
Basically, if there is a canonical way of reading it out loud, then it has an explicit sequence and is thus text.
By that rule it follows that: Musical notation is text as it is strictly sequential (in time) and maybe hierarchical if there are multiple tracks. Most mathematical notations are text, as they are also sequential, even matrices are only a hierarchy of sequences which in turn can be serialized. Chemical / molecular diagrams are not text, they can contain cycles. Same goes for electronic and logic circuit schematics or rail way diagrams found in public transportation.
> Similarly the example about the Wikipedia text of human rights being supposedly impossible to convey via image
Schematics and diagrams are only use full if / because they are subject to a certain defined visual vocabulary. So if you had a visual vocabulary in that domain then you could express them as a diagram.
In this case the diagrams are good for communication but terrible for expression, I think this distinction is being overlooked by many here.
The oldest and easiest is the visual in 3D, then comes the visual in 2D.
Those exist since we have eyes.
Our brain have dedicated and sizeable infrastructure for that. Children can communicate in 3D (gestures, posture, expressions, objects) and in 2D drawings before learning textural communication with great effort.
Text is more regular and reliable in certain contexts (not always, sometimes a pictogram or others are better), when the circumstances are proper for that.
Text has its uses, just like all the other forms, not being paramount, not at all!
(I'd also argue about that we could read old texts. Sometimes yes, but sometimes we cannot read present ones neither if the cultural and knowledge background is inadequate. Which is just aggravated by the ages)
However reading pictures is much more subjective than most non-arts-educated might tend to realise. We had a weekly class where we would discuss scenes and pictures and what it evoked in people, what they "read" in it. The one big takeaway I got from this, is just how profoundly different a room full of people can see very clear pictures. This subjectiveness is even worse when you look at gestures and body language of actors – what one student saw as strong and self sufficient, the other might see as forceful and destructive etc.
Of course we also have codified visual languages (traffic signs, warning labels, ...), but they only will work for low complexity info ("Warning slippy surface", but not: "Watch out the last step of that stairway was built to high and might cause you to fall"). The low information density of such symbols is great if you want simple messages to be understandable by a big number of persons very quickly and with little cognitive overhead.
Text can shine when symbols don't suffice, when pictures are to vague, when gestures are unclear. Text is easy to create, modify and copy and I love it for that. My freelance time as a graphic designer convinced me that many people think they can communicate visually, while very few actually can. A lot of people already have issues with getting their message (be it text or spoken word) understood in the way they meant it at the side of the recipient, with visual language this is likely worse.
Are emojies text ? the blog post found a 4000-byte Twitter logo and cited this as evidence of the efficiency of text, but they forgot that there is a vast store of similary-sized photos that cost nothing more than 3 or 4 bytes and sometimes less, comparable to the very same letters they are using to write the post (and conveying much more than a single useless-on-its-own sound). By any definition that depend on the fact that text is stored as contiguous bytes, emojies ARE text.
Are 2D tables text ? they are not linear (not as we see them) yet one table with entries arranged appropriately could be much more percise and expressive than a truck-load of prose paragraphs. And an xy plot is much more expressive than both. 2D tables is not that much more expensive in storage than text though (a bunch of html tags surrounding the text is one representation), and an xy plot could be derived from a table by computation. So with a little bit of computation you gain the precision and expressiveness of a visual plot with the storage overhead of a bunch of numbers. This example (simplistically) mirrors current work in ML on compression of photos and videos. Imagine if computers are advanced enough that a picture is no more storage than an emojii, all arguments. about "efficiency" of text that appeal to its economic representation in computer memory become moot then.
The point I'm making is: "text" vs. "pictures" is not fine-grained enough of a distinction. The real distinction is [ "numbers" vs. "graphs" vs. "letters" vs. "tables" vs. ...), its a big multiway competition between various forms of symbols and symbol-organization schemas humans invented for a variety of purposes and arguments for or against any of them shouldn't appeal to how they are represented or communicated (text could be drawn on photos or arranged on powerpoint slides, images could be compressed and redrawn to a high degree of fidelity). And there is a lot of paradigms "in-between" that piggy-backs on one of the two representation but aren't either of them (plots, tables, emojies). Tools and technological limitations are also to blame for a lot of pictures' shortcomings, the ability to copy-paste being one of them.
A lot of discussions here would benefit alot if all parties state beforehand exactly what are their definition of text and what their argument appeals to in that definition.
I agree on the power of text as a technology, and the role it played. China & the Roman Republic/Empire are good examples of this.
But.... I think it's worth remembering that we lost something as we gained something. We tend to severely underestimate oral "technologies." Scholarship existed before writing. History, geography, etc. Text spent centuries or millennia as a peripheral media. It was mostly used for accounting in Mesopotamia & the Levant for thousands if years. Sometimes for religious, magical or political reasons. It wasn't a major medium for philosophy, storytelling, history or such until much later... So writing didn't really play much of a "knowledge accumulation" role until pretty late in the game.
I suspect that it developed so slowly because oral traditions were hard to beat. They had their own advantages. A song was an efficient way to learn history.
An important, if subtle, fact is that mediums are not just for communication. They're modes of thought. Text and speech will yield different ideas. Mathematics are a huge example. Ways of conveying mathematical concepts (eg negative numbers) enables us to conceive of mathematical concepts. If you write an essay, the ideas/conclusions you will have will be different. Even the difference between a scroll and a codex (book) can make a big difference. That difference is evident if you compare the modern practice of Judaism (scroll tradition) to Islam and Christianity (book traditions).
Socrates/Plato give us a nominally dividing line between the oral and written approaches. Socrates may have even been illiterate, but either way, his main medium was oral. In fact, most Greek philosophy came from the "mostly oral" period. This is why Plato, Aristotle, (Diogenes?) and others of that generation become so important. They're the link. They wrote down ideas created by oralists. This is how they could be accessed by macedonians, Romans and such.
I wonder if the charming, curious style we associate with the likes of Socrates or Diogenes is inherent to oralism. Compare them to later, literary philosophers... The literalists are far more grim. Senecca comes to mind. Even Aristotle. He's not as grim as roman philosophers, but he is a lot more serious. The oralists were playful... and greek/roman philosophy (imo) declines as writing overtakes oral traditions.
Socrates' thoughts "On the Forgetfulness that Comes with Writing" are recorded (tellingly) by Plato. It's not Plato's best piece, but very relevant to our times. If you memorise instead of using text, all your knowledge is inside your head. On paper, ideas are lifeless. Living ideas inside your head interact with each other, refine, create new ideas. When we convey them to one another, we can ask questions, read expressions, etc.
We don't just have books, we have the internet and pocket computers to access it. Socrates' point applies even more now.
One relevant example relevant to our times is "shades of uncertainty." Say you read an article about the economy, GDP growth, unemployment & such. A lot of that information is uncertain, either inherently or at this point in time. There may be dissident positions. That's usually lost in text but not in conversation.
I definitely think a short conversation about this year's economic data is more informative and deep than an article by that same economist.
It's also interesting that 3D is so hard to translate into a usable context in computing. VR has felt like a second-class citizen compared to a mouse and keyboard in terms of usability. Not that the two are mutually exclusive – it was nice having as many giant monitors as you wanted in a 3D space.
What's needed is a 3D web browser, with websites connected with portals that you can walk through. I think gather.town is surprisingly close to that. http://gather.town/
I cannot see in visual 3D. If anything I can see in strictly bigger than 2D. (a flat 'screen' with a tinge of depth perception, which I fear I don't make much use of when I spend most of my time in front of a flat 2D computer screen)
Text is efficient at transmitting data. If I want to describe a concept or an event, text is king.
However, media is more efficient at transmitting sentiment. It will take you far more than 4000 bytes of text to transmit the feeling or emotion an icon can convey, when used well. This is why we've (as a species) started using emojis, and why media leans to emotion and sentiment while text leans to data.
This is an exaggeration, life is almost always a grey area - but I hope you get my point.
Sure, having a code point in your character set that represents a bird[1] makes sense but I really hate that font designers now have control over the way I get to express my emotions and how others perceive them.
[0]: Sure, ":)" and ":/" also depend on the font but much less.
Ignoring the arguments of whether to include the nose (the original form was :-) which I much prefer) on the basic examples, people introduced new combinations faster than I cared to pay attention to so knowing what they meant was not always easy.
It ended up that there were whole dictionary like lists of them in some Usenet groups' FAQ documents.
As soon as you have more than a few of any symbolic representation (text smilies, emoji, gifs/memes[†], ...), it becomes dynamic grammar in its own right and away from the core few it is a mess of people not understanding what you mean either because they don't get your reference or you have used a reference incorrectly (or, if incorrectly is the wrong term, in a manner differing significantly from its common use).
[†] it is less of an issue with meme images/animations as they usually have a text portion making them far less ambiguous, but the issue is still there overall
I don't agree with that. A photo doesn't contain much information about the emotional state of the photographer, unlike a few lines in a diary. My travel diaries are much richer in sentiment than my travel photos.
To me, emojis are a form of data compression. Common concepts are compressed into symbols: happy, sad, car, eggplant with 3 drops. Emojis are macros. That works as long as you exchange common concepts ("I feel sick"), but it falls flat if you need to venture beyond that ("My back is itchy"). You couldn't write a country's constitution with emojis. At least you shouldn't.
Likewise, a picture only shows what's visible. Travel photos don't capture the smell, the temperature, or how you feel after staying up all night with a sick stomach. A few words in a diary will.
Really? Why are video games so visual, in that case? To update you on the situation your character is in, inform you where the enemies are, give you feedback on your current health and objectives... most video games use a rich graphical system of colors and symbols overlaid over a high resolution image of the game world...
If text is more efficient at communicating ‘events’, why aren’t there ‘action text adventures’?
I probably have blown more time on text MUDs than all other computer gaming combined, but even back when I used to play things like counterstrike I spent an inordinate amount of time using text to chat with team mates or in the console binding and triggering macros.
According to my understanding a medium is a mean of communication, thus including text. OTOH it seams from your message that these are two complementary objects. Is my understanding correct?
Another example if we compare logographic language systems (e.g. Chinese characters, hieroglyphs ...) to alphabetic systems. I guess we can say both are text, but logographic systems are close to pictures as well (pictographic systems even more so) and they can convey information in much less characters, at the cost that one needs to know a much larger "alphabet".
Similarly if the information we are trying to transmit is actually an image, transmitting the actual image is certainly much less information than transmitting a description of the image. That is also why the comparison with the bird and twitter image falls flat. The image conveys a specific image, not the generic image of a bird. To describe that specific would need many more characters than 4. Similarly if I have a large set of numbers, it's much more efficient to store and transmit in binary format not as text.
The pulses of light in an optical fiber are not alphabetic text either, but we are not talking about baseband here.
I was restricting myself to discuss abstractions that are directly used by humans. The messages send in the optical telegraph are conveying things more complex than letters which I would say is what we associate with text. Now you might say that those messages are text, but then we might as well say language is the most flexible and efficient way of communicating, and that's probably correct, but also completely meaningless in this context. That's the issue with this posts, it's either so general that is essentially meaningless, or so specific that it's clearly wrong in general.
What are characters if not pictures? What is text if not a sequence of pictures? What's a picture if not a depiction of a concept?
In a bag-of-words type of model, I see no difference between a word and a painting, no difference between the body of work of van Gogh and the body of work of Kafka. They both use multiple sets of concepts to compose new sets of concepts.
Pictures and text are both programming languages of concepts.
Self-promoting here: my project primitive.io makes it possible to collaboratively review code in VR. We use our tool daily to explain code faster and with greater information retention.
Imagine saying “always bet on punch cards”. Look at any whiteboard in any company or school. It’s filled with text and diagrams. Then watch how someone interacts with a PowerPoint or whiteboard. There is animation and dimensional extension. The way people think and organize and communicate thoughts is multifaceted and multidimensional. It only makes sense that we should be able to work and program in the same way.
The problem with punch cards is that they weren't effective: they were what technology permitted back then. But technology permits many other things besides text nowadays, and text still remains an amazing and effective piece of "technology", in the broadest sense of the term.
Are we communicating, right now, via animation or fancy PowerPoint slides?
I’m not proposing punch cards as effective. It was just a simple comparative example, which I thought was clear and that the rest of my post clarified what I actually meant.
> Are we communicating, right now, via animation or fancy PowerPoint slides?
It’s ironic you bring this up, because I don’t find this method particularly effective.
"Send me a link to a news story that turns out to be a video, or an audio file, and I’ll close it unconsumed: I haven’t got that kind of time. Send me a transcript: I’ll finish reading in half the time it would take me to passively sit there while it played, and I’ll more clearly remember it."
The author is ok with sitting and staring at the article because it's faster. What he misses is that it forces you to actually be in a position / context where you can read from the screen.
Personally I have been giving a lot of though about balancing how I consume content. Text vs audio. Walking / exercising or whatever instead of reading.
I don't believe we should optimise on "time to consume" but rather "healthiness of consume".
Depending on the content I think text can still be a pretty good bet. Using a screen reader or assistive features on devices can allow you to have an article written in text read aloud to you. I've seen lots of setups too where people will save articles and have them processed to create audio files that they listen to on their runs or whatever.
Actually I've wrote about couple days ago: https://audiobased.app/articles/screen-time-and-headphones-t...
btw. I would be happy to learn what setups have you seen
It's frustrating that although so much more content is publicly accessible for free today, I find on the whole that information density has decreased, probably due to advertising as monetization.
I prefer text because I can skim to the important parts and jump through links. Audio and Video need better methods for this.
If we could summarize information better, in text, audio, video, etc. I think the internet would be more useful and people would be able to communicate more effectively. We need publicly accessible channels of higher information density.
People here are suggesting that images/video are superior, but there's the cliche, "a picture is worth a thousand words". Well, which thousand words? Do they convey the same thousand words to you as they do to me?
Words leave nothing to the imagination. This is one of the most important traits of good exposition. Its arguments/messages are out there, free of the primate dominance gestures, the biases, the emotional stimulants, waiting to be vetted for their logical soundness.
Words leave plenty to the imagination too. Interpreting what authors might've meant in books is all we ever did in English classes in school. Interpreting what the founding fathers might've meant in the Constitution is also a fierce public debate.
It's just a tradeoff ladder. Pictures represent pure unmitigated creativity, photographs represent the world, text is pictures + grammar, mathematics is when you compress the grammar to a few dead-simple rules that yiu could teach a bunch of silicate rocks to understand. At each step in the ladder, you lose freedom and expressiveness broadness but you gain freedom and expressiveness in a much more Domain-Specific way. And off course there are imperfections and leakages everywhere.
If only. Differing interpretations of words are one of the dominant sources of political discord in the US. The things words leave to the imagination are killing people.
Author is really excited about really old information technology. He makes some good points.
For example. Graphical programming languages are nowhere. Closest I had was either VHDL or backed by copious amounts of XML like Xtend. And both of those have a textual Component as well.
They are super popular in game development. The most popular one is Unreal Engine's "Blueprint". Unity does not include visual scripting, but there are popular plugins on Asset Store, the biggest one is PlayMaker. Unity Technologies themselves plan to release their own, in-engine visual programming tool this year.
Apart from that, visual programming is commonly used for shader programming, video compositing and AI/animations scripting [1].
I am a programmer and like many of my peers I cannot stand those systems, but designers and artists love them. They are widely used everywhere from small indie games up to AAA releases, not only for simple logic but for modelling complex behaviours and flow controls too.
https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com
[1] Example of AI graph form The Division (5:34 - 6:10): https://youtu.be/fZOZ2daE-lA?t=334
The only upside of graphical languages is that because of their limited capabilities, they focus on only one abstraction layer and that allows you to visualize that layer quite cleanly.
You can't program anything more sophisticated or step outside of the only abstracrion layer you are allowed to program in. Eg. you can't write your custom for loops by dragging and dropping boxes and you also cannot orchestrate dags or box diagrams using dragging other boxes around.
The issues with graphical languages arethings like being much harder diff/merge and version control generally, being dependent on IDEs, and severely limited by mouse usage. I don't see any of those issues as being impossible to overcome, but instead graphical programming is held back by always being implemented as a DSL with no attempt to meet the requirements of a general purpose language.
Not nowhere. Labview is/was pretty successful. But not generally successful, no.
Sure you wouldn’t want to implement the underlying systems in them, but I do think they have their place and are often undervalued by developers.
As was already pointed out, graphical languages are massive in game design. They are also used in audio processing, in scientific and engineering software through labView, and in various other places.
They are very popular in fields where we want to open up programming to more people than those who call themselves "programmers".
If all you mean is prose, as writing sentences in whatever native language you speak, then I must respectfully disagree with the OP.
Yes, text is marvelous. I'm an author of multiple books and have a passion for the written word, but there are things for which there are better ways to convey information.
A simple example is electronics. A circuit diagram is not text. It is a graphical representation using a standard notation. It is much easier to understand than spending paragraphs describing which component should connect to which other component.
Unless you decide that "text" should include such special representations. Then the question becomes: where do you draw the line between what you consider text and what is no longer text. In an isometric exploded view of some mechanical device text? Are architecture plans text? Because all those representations are better than the written word to convey their meaning...
Source code is text. Emoji are text. Some simple math expressions are text, but more complicated ones involving specialist layout rules are not. Architecture plans, no way.
Linearity is part of it. Source code and emoji and simple math expressions can be seen as a linear stream of "characters" (defined loosely), even on a fundamental level. An architectural plan could be transliterated into a linear form, but that would be a transformation.
Of course then you need to explain why audio doesn't count as text. Discreteness? Ease of faithful reproduction?
Architecture is a beautiful example which provokes thinking. From first view it is a non-text, but an architect Antoni Gaudí has developed an attitude with hanging models which made his architecture plans to share some abilities of text even not being written. You may tell me I am crazy but his hanging models is a WYSIWYG model of something from real world so I consider it a text despite it could not be simply copied. IDK maybe a modern architect software shares that attitude, for make these models be copied easy. So my opinion is that architecture plan may be text at least from a structure point of view.
Something closer to a definition of text is parts of their criteria for encoding symbols [1] but even that is imperfect.
Couple of examples:
- For a musician to convey a musical idea, the arguably most straight forward and effective way to do so is just to play/sing/record it. Any other means like musical notation, textual description, midi etc. require a lot of additional knowledge and work on both ends of the communication and come with their own drawbacks.
- The Wikipedia text about human rights in the article is a great example when written text is better than an image. But say I want to describe what the grand canyon looks like. Personally, I don't have the writing skills to really do it justice. On the other hand my phone has a camera so I can snap a couple of pictures that will get the other person a much better idea of how it is. In this case text is useful for additional information not visible in the image, like why the color of the rocks is how they are.
- If I'm living together with someone and want to discuss how to pain the walls, a pantone color swatch is going to be much more useful than textual description of the colors. Text is useful here after the decision to pass on the color code to the contractor.
- I reckon for most people it easier to follow instructions on how to cut up a chicken when they are in form of a video or image slide show over just written words.
I don't think the problem is whether text is better or not, but that often the choice of medium is not based on what makes most sense for the use case, but other considerations like what will yield better conversion numbers.
Electric circuit is a beautiful example between text and non-text. You know EC is drawing but any EC is made of hierarchy of two-port networks, so it is like system of equations written in unusual for mathematics way. You can add or erase any element or change any nominal and recalculate a new circuit instantly. If you have a friend working in an electronics, you can give him any valid EC and ask him what he gonna do with it. His answer will be reading, not just looking at.
That doesn't mean your definition is useless, its an interesting take to draw the lines between media along editabiliy, but I wouldn't call that a definition of text. It would exclude and include all the wrong things.
One is really starting to believe Wittgenstein that all disagreements boil down to definitions.
Text is very powerful, but it doesn't need to always work by itself (arguably works best together with other media)
That got a good chuckle out of me. It actually shows how there's not just "text".
This does not diminish the value and expressiveness of text, but it needs to be said that in 5000 years time we'll need both the Unicode specification and those 2-4000 bytes to decipher the author's post.
It's just a cost of digital media.
The bigger issue is how do we ensure digital media perseveres for so long.
Having english still understood after 5000 years seems much harder. But hey, latin is pretty old and we still understand that.
Nitpick: In all likelihood, an English dictionary would be enough. Even if the Unicode spec is lost, the text can probably be deciphered by using frequency analysis plus the dictionary to associate codepoints with characters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_Hieroglyphs_(Unicode_...
> text is the most powerful, useful, effective communication technology ever, period.
Nothing of this is actually true, period.
> I do not post to this blog with the intention of entertaining Hacker News Debate Club and I frequently disable comments or friend-lock posts in order to avoid this sort of nonsense. I'm not interested in further discussion.
Ah yes, the true seal of quality. (sarcasm)
xmlns:v="https://vecta.io/nano"
Could you kindly verify that by repeating your post using something other than what amounts to a text file?
If not maybe that's an even truer seal of irony.
Could you kindly present me your comment without using all these inferior non-text technologies involved on my side to read it off my screen? That's the irony, if anything.
The article was written in 2014. Worth remembering when nitpicking the text of an article.
Text is that it's highly compressible while also being highly compressed (and lossy) info already. To make text we have to filter our own ideas, and then to interpret text we have to add a bunch of info back from context.
Pictures have the same tricks up their sleeve. Bitmaps are great but inefficient. If we put it through a lossy compression, it's a lot better. If we make it semi procedurally with a vector file, it's even better. How far can we take a compressed procedural file though? Well.. .kkreiger was about 97 KB, and stores a full 3d shooter. For a meg, you could store 100 such full games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger
Text isn't best in every way. With clever design we can use all the same principles that make text efficient, and make other types of data more efficient. It is a very good default though.
If SVG counts as text, then text is just binary. The encoding is not important, the final result (an image you see on a screen, in the case of SVG) is.
Besides, try reading out the actual SVG source text to someone and see if they can tell you what the image you are describing is. I dunno about you, but I find thinking in terms of paths and strokes to be rather meaningless.
Or another example, do you consider Wavefront .obj files text? They're ascii files, but I don't consider a series of "v 0.123 0.234 0.345 1.0" as something I would ever read in text form and have even the slightest idea of what the final 3D model actually is. I have to view it visually. Its "technically" text, but its no more useful as text (for a human text reader) than if it were binary data. Encoding isn't what makes text what it is, so non-text things encoded as text aren't really text.
Actually I thought about talking about SVG, which would be the natural result of taking a text representation of shapes ... and then use abbreviations until you are at some expert level language (SVG for example), which would then break the argument again. You might as well use some binary representation then, because most people don't speak fluent SVG.
- wood working, absolutely horrible to work from text, which I've done.
- group ideation, as much as I love IM'ing, audio + diagrams personally feels like a more effective way of communication.
- troubleshooting, too many times I've had to text my parents how to troubleshoot their router only to end up calling them and slowly talking them through it.
These are super specific, but I'd still wager audio and video trump text in a significant number of general scenarios that require communication of some kind.
Anything that needs read optimization i.e. this is information that needs to be communicated over and over, text is better. But often that's not a requirement.
This is not an inherent problem of text, but a problem of synchronous vs asynchronous communication. Round-trip latency of a phone call is much shorter than IM. But I'd say that speech and text still use the same medium (language), so it's not really an argument either way.
The prominence and seeming economy of text in digital communications is probably because data is presented and transmitted as a one dimensional sequence of bits.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_painting
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing#Cuneiform_s...
[3] https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/pacifi...
Text is using the visual channel to transmit what language can convey, and language can convey generally almost everything we try express (likely more accurately and succinctly than drawings, gestures or other sounds).
However, I am not sure if that is supposed to affect my opinion of his take on text vs other media? (I try not to let prejudices like "he's a really smart person" affect me when discussing a topic that is very approachable to a wider population)
Text is also why XML, JSON, and Markdown are a thing.
When you can accomplish your tasks within a constrained range of expressivity, you do that (gas & break pedals, steering wheel, door handles, etc). But when you need greater expressivity, you're probably going to need text.
You can of course do this with multimedia or any other encoding, but text is pretty great at on-the-fly extensibility.
Many humans are less inhibited when they’re typing than when they are speaking face-to-face. Teenagers are less shy. With cellphone text messages, they’re more likely to ask each other out on dates. That genre of software was so successful socially that it’s radically improving millions of people’s love lives (or at least their social calendars). Even though text messaging has a ghastly user interface, it became extremely popular with the kids. The joke of it is that there’s a much better user interface built into every cellphone for human to human communication: this clever thing called “phone calls.”
It's not just dates. It's "How ru?" & "running 3m late" and such. This has advanced to where text messaging is now a distinct written dialect, unintelligible to someone from 1993. Meanwhile, voice messages and such are more peripheral... even though they now work through the same UIs and we all have earpieces in our ears anyway. Text is powerful.
That said, text is not always the most powerful media. Photos/selfies and such have become a major 1-to-1 communication medium too. I often find that a phone conversation way more efficient than an email chain.
I also think there are categories of writing that shouldn't be. "Number articles" where an article is describing a company's financial's, for example. A lot of newspapers try to describe a table in essay form. The table would be better. That is still text though, in the sense that this article uses the term.
Choosing the most powerful medium or submedium is crucially important.
Spolsky was right about this when he wrote that passage in 2004.
We should take seriously the idea that the lesser inhibition of textual communication has been a drawback on net, at least over the last 17 years.
I disagree. Drawing pictures is the oldest communication technology. Pictures evolved into text eventually. Characters in early texts frequently are just small pictures. Understanding pictures is easier than understanding text because of smaller cognitive load.
Text helps with 2 things: condensing information and manipulating abstractions that don't have an unambiguous visual representation (such as hope or price). But it comes at the price of needing to learn the alphabet and dictionary and apply them to mentally decode what is otherwise just a cryptic drawing.
Text may be more efficient in some cases, but say it's better universally is moot. For instance, texts are very bad for representing non-linear, concurrent workflows. Pictures are way more better in this case.
>Text is the most efficient communication technology.
It heavily depends on what you're going to communicate. For a blog post, text may be better. In other cases, a picture may be worth a thousand of words.
The article may have good points, but it's full of poor statements.
Given the current state of information technology, I agree that we are most efficient at processing text. However, that can change pretty quickly. Storage mechanisms similar to DNA can make the difference between text and multimedia irrelevant. It will happen because nature already does that.
Our eyes have the ability to input so much information which is what makes pictures valuable.
If you simply need to transmit small/simple data then text is the way to go.
I get what the author is trying to communicate, but it seems a bit arrogant
Compare all of that to text, which is at least thousands of years old. And then compare text to speech, which is hundreds of thousands of years old. Had a way to record and replay audio been developed before writing, it’s likely that you’d be listening to this comment right now, not reading it.
I’d say we’re at the extreme beginning of a highly audiovisual age. A millennium or two from now, writing “dead” words might seem as ancient to our descendants as foot messengers appear to us: useful for particular purposes but mostly irrelevant.
On a related note, the concept of logocentrism seems relevant here:
Sometimes it seems to mean ‘the English language’ or ‘language’ more broadly. Other times it seems to mean ‘strings of ASCII encoded Latin letters’. Sometimes it seems to mean ‘pictures of arrangements of letter like symbols’. In general it just amounts to ‘linear streams of data’.
Sure, if you define text that broadly, it covers a lot of things that are great.
But it’s a definition that’s so broad it defies its own terms. Text, defined that way, encompasses SVG files. Or even base64 encoded PNG files if you want. So that Twitter logo can be unambiguously shared through ‘text’ too. Look - here’s a tweet-sized version: https://twitter.com/bbcmicrobot/status/1237867433064464394?s...
But there’s a weird cultural bias built in to the assertion that all those things are ‘just text’. Sure, for someone who uses a US keyboard to type Latin alphabet characters left to right, base64 encoded binary, svg, or BBC BASIC, is ‘just text’. But that’s not exactly a universal perspective.
In the limit, this amounts to ‘always bet on data transmission and storage’.
A lot of the listed benefits of text are only realizable when the text is coupled with a specific ‘interpreter’ - be that an SVG renderer, a BBC micro, or a human who speaks English.
Doing stuff with text with computers is hard! Lexers, parsers and tokenizers are probably the most common sources of security bugs in history. And if the text is natural language, we still don’t have reliable computer tools for dealing with it - understanding or generating.
So I just guess I don’t really know what the point of this piece is. Data is all there is. Linear streams of data are often a thing. Because of the history of computing, western language character sets and conventions are often used to capture them in the same format as we use for written language.
I've seen some people pick up this medium very quickly, and others struggle for months with little progress. However, almost anyone can pickup Sketch or Illustrator for creating UI prototypes very quickly.
The expressiveness of text is not always a strength. It's very hard to build programming languages without text, but I strongly believe we still program too much when building UIs. Excel demonstrates that people can quickly pickup a minimal programming language for connecting data to UI, I think an Excel-Sketch hybrid is where the future lies for building applications in particular.
This is why in my 3D virtual space for work, Jel, fully collaborative text panels (synchronized via OT) are the primary kind of element you create: https://jel.app.
Drawings, sculptures, JPG files, videos etc. are more precise and are better at conveying a specific object or event, but not necessarily its meaning.
If I remember correctly, Neal Stephenson's Anathem deals with some of these themes.
Author should be conveying the unique aspects of Textual media but also it’s shortcomings. Comments here should be discussing the benefits and shortcomings of all kinds of media.
Instead both are discussing which one is better - Text or something else. A lot of it is mutually exclusive. The Tianamen square tank man image is powerful and impossible to encode in text with the same effect, and Nabokov’s prose is impossible to paint a picture of or how we struggle to describe tasting notes.
I have to learn decimal numbers: my intended audience needs to learn decimal numbers. But the resulting efficacy is a thousandfold. I think of letters and words like digits, but for communicating broader concepts.
So when we lack the symbols or combinations to express something, we need a unique picture to do so. Pictures are worth a thousand words, but only when a thousand words won’t suffice.
If text’s so darn great, after all, why do you need to draw a picture of it before I can understand it?
The author is saying that because pictures cannot easily capture arbitrary sentences, text is better. But the same applies with the roles reversed: text cannot capture arbitrary pictures! Instead of saying that one is better than the other outright, let’s move to media (for reading, composing, and programming) where the two can be intermingled appropriately, with as little friction as possible. We certainly have the technology for it...
To take an analogy, think of writing text as analogous to compressing data using a Huffman code. Our ideas correspond to the initial uncompressed data, natural language text corresponds to compressions of those source data, while our brains correspond to the Huffman tree that tells you how to decompress. With our brains/context we can recover the initial ideas, just like with the Huffman tree we can recover the uncompressed data. Without the Huffman tree, the compressed data are gibberish.
On the one hand this means that text is really powerful as the author says; we can store an incredible amount of information in a small amount space, and can reconstruct the source idea the text represents efficiently (if with some amount of ambiguity and error).
On the other hand text is very far from universal. Anyone who sees the Twitter logo sees the exact same thing (interpreting it as a bird, of course, requires the prior knowledge of what a bird is and looks like). However, anyone who sees a piece of text not only needs to understand the language it's written in, but also all of the ideas that it refers to. That's why we still have many examples of languages and texts that are undecipherable: we've lost the context they were originally written in. Even Egyptian hieroglyphics were undecipherable until the 1800s when people used the Rosetta stone to provide context to decipher it.
Text has further issues as well, chief among them its ambiguity. Not only is it easy to under-specify things in text, but it's also possible for the same piece of text to mean different things at different times and places.
As a culture these issues may be strengths; poetry and literature derive strength from this openness to interpretation, and many would argue so does law where statutes written centuries ago can be adapted to our time. But from a purely data storage and transmission perspective, these are clear weaknesses.
My point is that context matters a lot, and (I assume) that it can only be reconstructed through a lot of text.
Obviously the best computer tools offer both visual and textual ways of working. But if you have to pick one, bet on text.
I was about to add a caveat about pure visual tasks, like image composition, but advances like DALL-E are starting to put those tasks into question as well. If I were making a photo editor today, I would bet on text.
Just because our current technology is best able to handle and deal with text says nothing about the power of sound, images, sketches, drawings and handwritten notes.
> suggests choosing the least powerful [computer] language suitable for a given purpose
This argument is pretty trivially false.
By this logic, the best programming language is assembly, because it's the most general. Actually, writing opcodes directly might be more general, in case your assembler doesn't have translations for some undocumented opcodes. The best editor would be a hex editor. The best web browser would be netcat piped into a hex editor, as well. The best OS would be no OS at all (because OSes impose restrictions in order to make programming easier and safer). The best application, for any kind of application, would be an interpreter that would allow you to create your own, however you wanted.
Engineering is necessarily a tradeoff between generality and efficiency. Technology is largely used to make things more efficient, and so our tools always impose some constraints on the problem/solution space in order to be more efficient than not using that tool.
A common design pattern is a specialized fast-path and slower (but more general) fallback.
In addition, as many others have stated here: "the right tool for the right job". Videos, audio, pictures, and interactive tools will always be more efficient for certain problems. If your sole concern is generality, then yes, by all means, use text. However, this will almost never happen; your design space will almost always necessitate a tradeoff of generality with efficiency - in which case, pure plain text is rarely the solution.
Like any "hard and fast" rule, however, it tends to go a bit pear-shaped, when viewed from certain contexts.
As someone that has made the mistake of designing a "pure" iconic interface, I can tell you that alternatives to text UI can be quite difficult to implement[0].
But a well-designed symbolic UX can be leaps and bounds more effective than text.
In some contexts.
Basically, YMMV.
The main issue with text, is that is assumes that:
1) Everybody can read, and
B) Everybody is on the same page.
In any given day, I notice written signs everywhere. But the really important stuff tends to be done symbolically.
Notably, caution/danger signs and other warnings.
Road signs are almost always text, but the same thing I just mentioned, applies to important cautionary road signs. You can assume that anyone driving can read (written road test), so why use icons?
That's because we can process symbols much more quickly and effectively than text. A well-designed icon can be instantly recognizable. Take, for example, the classic radiation or biohazard icons.
They still need "training" to properly interpret; but nothing like the level of education required to simply read (and understand) the word "BIOHAZARD."
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I have learned the hard way, not to get too creative, when presenting GUI. I've learned to use platform conventions, and ISO symbols[1], where possible; even if I am not that thrilled with the aesthetics.
[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/the-road-most-travel...
Yes, Text, Text, Text - The past, present and future of writing (and publishing).
There is a strong opinion (which I share) that text coding is much more efficient than 'graphical' alternatives due to text flexibility and nice features ( easy compare, universal medium...)
Cute, overly self congratulatory turns of word aside, this had me look up the etymology of text. I hadn’t put it together before, but woven is such a fitting root for the fabric of our thoughts made manifest.
There is no such thing as pictures. It’s just photons that bounce off or are emitted by certain surfaces that fall on our eyes and are then transmitted as electric impulses to our brains which trigger synapses....it’s all just stuff firing in our brains.
It’s pretty obvious what the author of the article means by picture and texts. I don’t think there’s anyone who is not trying to be deliberately obtuse who would have a hard time figuring out what they mean by pictures and text here.
It certainly is not.
Think about character recognition software. The point is to take a picture, and map it to a discrete value. The pictures that correspond to "a", for example, have a lot of variation. But the point of writing is to remove the ambiguity inherent in drawing something, and map it to one of a small set of discrete values.
So even before binary encoding systems, or even the printing press, text was a technology for conveying information with less ambiguity than drawing.
One could argue speech is similar. There are a lot of variations of sound corresponding to a phoneme, but language reduces a continuous stream of sound to a discrete sequence of phonemes in our brain, which are then disambiguated into words and sentences conveying concepts.
The whole continuous -> discrete mapping underlies both spoken language and text.
One of the things I’ve learn doing e-commerce is that if you believe you can just use more text to compensate for short comings in you UX you’ll be very disappointed.
We had a subscription product, you where informed that you’d be sign up for a monthly charge seven times during checkout and people still complained. They just saw two prices and click on the lowest. No amount of text will fix people who are basically on auto-pilot.
Most people in the world are not. Or don't speak English at all, another problem with text that you don't find with images.
To be needlessly pedantic, my computer drew the image that conveyed this to me.
Less pedantically text is a medium of exchange for language, and a lossy one just like spoken word. I think there's a lot of power in its flexibility due to that lossiness. It's also one of its subtle weaknesses - we can read text from 5,000 years ago, but there's going to be much debate over understanding the text because of how much context has been lost to time.
the least studied 'character' of this alphabet is the most imporant, the most critical character in any phonetic alphabet is the blank space. withoutitphoneticwritingsdoesnotmakesasmuchsesnse.
> Master Foo said nothing, but pointed at the moon. A nearby dog began to bark at the master's hand.
> “I don't understand you!” said the programmer.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/gui-programmer....
image: https://imgur.com/a/8J6yeRe
But if you started from the image, and asked people to generate a sentence from it, you would get a lot of variation from the quoted sentence.
> It can be translated.
It needs to be translated. No such issue with photos.
Images are wonderful if you don't live in a bubble where everybody speaks the same language.
I design systems using both diagrams and text sometimes laid out in understood, non-linear patterns. I also enjoy music.
I don't know much about it, but there in a talk, Jordan Peterson addressed that there are people who can think in text, in pictures or even both. And that trait says a lot about ones character.
Interesting stuff
One was only text.
I’ve been watching videos of pets (dogs, cats) being “button trained”—being taught to use (primitive, non-syntactic) language by making associations between things/acts/emotional states and the pressing of one or another audio-playing buttons that has been placed on the floor.
It has very much driven home the point for me, that “spoken language” is actually not something inherent and instinctual to humans (or to any species); but rather is a technology. It’s just a technology that’s rather simple to learn, if you have the right underlying hardware acceleration (e.g. a cerebral cortex)—and, crucially, a teacher. For other intelligent mammals, apparently the teacher is the only component they’re missing!
Language is a technology that humans in particular find very intuitive—at least at a young age when our brains are malleable—but not one we inherently start with. We absorb it easily if we’re immersed in a society where everybody uses language from birth. But in situations where that’s not true (feral children, some very broken homes) we don’t.
In a world where every human being instantly had all entrained structure in their neocortex erased, such that we were “reduced” to being upright hairless apes with the capacity for language but no knowledge of it, I don’t think we’d just instantaneously come up with the idea of language and begin attempting to develop languages to communicate, the way modern people instantly try to develop a creole of the languages they do know, when stuck in a situation with people who share no common language with them.
The idea to associate concepts with specific mouth-noises—and to condition others to use those same mouth-noises for the same concepts, to facilitate transmission of thought—might randomly arise in a few people, but it’d need to catch on and spread from there, just like any other technology. It would either need to be observed and copied, or actively taught.
And I hypothesize that that is what happened (pre)historically: at some point, there were several memetic “waves” spreading increasingly-technologically-advanced (e.g. syntactic, expressive) forms of language across human populations with brains already structurally amenable to them. Of course, each wave would only be a struggle to the generation that pioneered it; the next generation, being immersed in that new, more-complex language form from birth, would find it similarly intuitive.
(This makes me wonder whether we’ve yet hit the “limits of linguistic expressiveness” for our current brain size, such that we’d need to unlimit e.g. average skull diameter at birth to let us get any fancier with language; or whether we’ve still got some, ah, “headroom” left.)
I agree, as you say until you reach the point where newborns are already surrounded by it.
>It’s just a technology that’s rather simple to learn, if you have the right underlying hardware acceleration (e.g. a cerebral cortex)—and, crucially, a teacher.
No teacher needed whatsoever quite often, but maybe so usually, so I can not say crucial.
>And I hypothesize that that is what happened (pre)historically: at some point, there were several memetic “waves” spreading increasingly-technologically-advanced (e.g. syntactic, expressive) forms of language across human populations with brains already structurally amenable to them. Of course, each wave would only be a struggle to the generation that pioneered it; the next generation, being immersed in that new, more-complex language form from birth, would find it similarly intuitive.
The evolution of more expressive vocalizations might have been required along these lines for us to reach where we always thought modern man was to begin with.
As a human being, it is quite possible to have verbal intelligence higher than spatial intelligence, and indeed I know some people with verbal tilt and some other people with spatial tilt. These people tend to think & approach problems differently, while having different strengths and weaknesses. Naturally, similar people cluster together, and some professions (e.g. lawyers, journalists, writers, programmers) are more amenable to verbally tilted persons, while other professions (mechanical engineering, airplane piloting, architecture) are amenable to spatially tilted persons.
Looking around via this lens, discerning cognitive styles inherent in design of the human experience is enlightening. One can see that our physical and social, educational environments and governing institutions are designed with one cognitive style in mind at the expense of the other: and this privilege goes to verbal cognitive style.
Let me offer a different perspective: to a person with higher spatial and weaker verbal cognition, this environment looks physically simplistic, tasteless, sometimes outright boring, often suffocatingly so. Utilitarian safety & simplicity prevailing over beauty and shape-being, denying the inhabitants possibilities of space meaningful by itself. Letters, words, strings of words are everywhere, starting with high-school where the recent historical trend of increasing verbalization of curriculum continues, and on to adult life where verbally intensive professions pay more and command significantly more power (note how in the aforementioned occupation list the second one contains less status-worthy & more specialized occupations). Limitless possibilities of rendered worlds on megapixel screens collapse into a flat-designed abstract hellscape of recursively composed words and menus. The brain of the child - a pinnacle of neuroplasticity - adapts, as relentless march of critical developmental periods continues, unnecessary white matter pathways wither away, while economically useful ones are potentiated and strengthened for the forthcoming endless competition with similar human beings, similarly shaped. The best and brightest in this game of words become lawyers and career politicians, movers and shakers of our world; but are they truly our best, and do they truly imagine the referents of their symbols ? Are we led by seeing or blind ?
Much could be said about benefits of verbal thinking, endless composability (to some, vacuous, denying interesting constrained structure) of syntax & grammar & semantics, and rightly so. Yet one wonders, which avenues of thought, of being, both alone and together as a people, were not taken. How a civlization of prevailing gestalt could look like ? Confronted with this state of affairs, one wonders, if "Always betting on text", pedal-to-the-metal, more-of-the-same is really going to bring us somewhere at all ?
If you, dear reader, have some latent spatial/geometrical imagination which was pushed away by economically profitable word manipulation engines that grew through you, maybe you too wonder about this question.
What would a high spacial intelligence, low verbal intelligence individual thrive as a President, CEO, or other type of leader?
Those jobs revolve around effective communication, and I believe that will always favor high verbal intelligence individuals.
(Just kidding. Fantastic article.)
What's interesting is pretty much all file formats are still readable (The media they are stored on is often not)
If you have the file it should be readable with a program you can find on Google.
On topic, No, although the article might be technically correct the biggest thing holding back many consumer products is lack of ability for non-text.
Signal had massive issues for years because it didn't have emoji. Now it's up with the rest. It's so much easier now you can copy a photo from Signal.
Like all these apps it needs work, like where's my real gun emoji. But they'll get there.
Text has all the same properties as an image.
It’s a composite of elements of varying height, width, and meaning to the whole.
Some sentences can be longer, or shorter. One element can be overloaded with meaning more than another.
I’m not really sure if there’s a point here at all.
And from the claims it makes ("text is the oldest") it seems either forgot about it, or is not even aware such thing exists.
I despise videos when I want to learn something. Give me a nice text (+ pictures if a subject requires it) so I can follow at my own pace: slow down, skip or skim as needed.