Comment by rayiner
8 hours ago
> Speaking to people in a meeting allows them to emote, express difficulty of understanding, understand the sentiment and priority of what they're hearing -- and most of all, it allows them to listen rather than read. People speak at a much lower information density, and this is a less taxing form of communication.
Is that why everything is a Youtube video these days instead of written articles?
The real danger of Tik Tok and Youtube is that it allowed people who can't communicate using writing onto the Internet.
Yes, see my comment below. Memo -> meeting, book -> podcast / audiobook, newspaper article -> 10min youtube video, even, meme -> yt-short/tiktok
People are naturally motivated to watch, listen, and interact with other people. There's less a need to explain why cognitive effort is required, lower risk to bounce-off the format because it's to difficult/boring/frustrating/etc. We're already primed to expend effort interacting with others.
I think there's also something more naturally-fit to our attention spans in oral media. Whilst people frequently claim our attention spans are dropping -- I think this is false (and some research agrees). Instead, media is being adapted to fit what our attention spans always were.
It is just in reading, and engaging with long-format content, our minds frequently drifted. We frequently stoped paying attention and returned, over and over.
Instead, with shorter oral media we largely pay more attention but over shorter intervals.
A conversation also proceeds to manage attention/interest/etc. well, in somewhat dynamically adapting itself to the level of cognitive effort its participants are willing to spend.
Certainly I find myself naturally adapting my phrasing, humor, and so on according to the people i'm talking to -- based on whether they are showing interest, listening, understanding and so on. This is how attention should always have been managed.
Writing always was, in my view, a necessary evil for the vast majority of purposes to which it was put. Now, not all, of course -- we still need checklists, scripts, technical notes, accounting books, and the like.
> Yes, see my comment below. Memo -> meeting, book -> podcast / audiobook, newspaper article -> 10min youtube video, even, meme -> yt-short/tiktok
Yeah, a dog can understand spoken words but can't read a memo. We should strive to use our human faculties and hold others to that standard, instead of lowering ourselves to communicating like animals.