Comment by PaulHoule

Marshall McLuhan thought that Adolf Hitler played really well on the radio but would not have played well on television, people would have seen his face turn red.

It's hard to tease apart the differences between modalities. On Youtube today there are many "videos" that are good to play in the background, be it Technology Connections, Pod Save America, or Asmongold's show. Part of the experience of reading is that an individual can find things that are rare, obscure, that it doesn't have to be massy at all [1] -- in the past economics required television and radio to be massy but podcasts, in principle, are really cheap and could service obscure tastes. Another fraction is that reading itself is a filter: even in the core a lot of people like Asmongold are functionally illiterate, in a place like Rwanda you just can't reach most people through writing.

[1] read https://www.amazon.com/Information-Machines-Their-Impact-Med..., read https://www.amazon.com/Dispersing-Population-America-Learn-E...