Comment by velik_m
11 years ago
I agree, the wikipedia example is especially strained, sure you can not represent that sentence clearly in picture, but can you represent Mona Lisa or Beethoven's 5th in text? Different types of representations are used for different things, sometimes they overlap and one is more efficient than the other and yes text has been pretty useful.
I'd argue that the moment we're not trying to convey emotional impact, but instead, raw information, text wins even in those cases.
Text is a very compact digital form, which is excellent for copying, splicing, recombining, algorithmic parsing, etc. Our computers are essentially, even in the case of MP3 or JPEG formats, storing it as a textual string and only at the very end, converting it back to images or sound.
The primary uses for non-string/text based formats (and encoding schemes related to those) is when we're trying to get our (or others') brains to react in a particular emotional manner, for which it obviously makes sense to poke the right buttons.
> can you represent Mona Lisa or Beethoven's 5th in text
It was first created in text :)
How many people could fully experience Beethoven's 5th by reading the sheet music, assuming they've never heard it before?
For musically gifted people who read sheet music every day, I have heard that they start to hear scores in their head while reading them, and that it's not so different than reading words. So in the case of classical music, the comparison to text is quite applicable. Shakespeare is almost unintelligible to me until I see it performed. I see no difference between this and a textually encoded symphony.