Comment by ukoms
11 years ago
Every letter, number or any sign is a "picture". In fact every written text is in fact structured array of simplified pictures, which happens to be understandable under conditions of given language rules. What should be bet is information. It doesn't really matter what communication tool will be used - information is the creme de la creme. Think about this - I can write simple text: "Mother should love their childrens". Would you still bet on text, if i wrote this in different language? "Każda matka powinna kochać swoje dzieci" or "Kila mama lazima kuwapenda watoto wao" isn't as understandable by most of people, despite the fact letter I used are almost identical. And how about other characters? "יעדער מוטער זאָל ליבע זייער קינדער" or "すべての母親が子どもを愛する必要があります" (thanks google translate ;))? In the end what matter is not text itself, but message behind it.
> Would you still bet on text, if i wrote this in different language? "Każda matka powinna kochać swoje dzieci"
I happen to understand that, and if I haven't I would just google translate it.
Now, if you made a video saying that and I couldn't understand you - no such luck.
Text is the only medium for which we have reliable operations working on semantic level.
The parent post even used google translate to generate some of those sentences. You can't do that with video/audio.
You could enter the sentence into google translate, have it attempt to synthesize a pronunciation, and then you verbally mimic it to the best of your abilities. But now, not only are you compounding the inaccuracies of google translate, plus the inaccuracies of the speech synthesizer, plus the inaccuracies of your own pronunciation, which means the viewer has no reliable way to return to the original source material. But the entire process is still reliant on text at one point.
Just to prove a sibling comment's point, I copied and pasted all of your translations in to Google, where it was able to auto-detect the language based on how text encoding works, and was able to render them in to my native language. It took under 5 minutes to do all of them. (I got the languages Polish, Swahili, Yiddish, and Japanese.)
I doubt it would have been nearly so trivial had you given us sound clips or a picture of those words written out.
It's simply the case that digital strings, of which text is a kind, are most amenable to algorithmic manipulation, and are the basis of most of our computing tools. Even when computers deal with other types of data, the first step is almost always to reduce it to this form. (Which would have been the case with a picture of the characters written - it would have located the characters and recreated the digital text.)
Medium matters.
The difference is that text is, so to speak, digital. You can't copy a picture without information loss, but ten thousand people can copy a written sentence from each other and end up with exactly the same sentence at the end. If you're worried about "information", we can read political tracts from the second century and still understand what's meant - whereas the intended meaning of paintings or even plays from the same time period can completely pass us by.
I think the person you are replying to meant symbols when he said "pictures". People aren't copying the text but the symbols. Even if the symbols were more picture-esque there wouldn't be information loss unless the symbols were too complex.
You are right - ajuc, lmm, ObviousScience - text as digital form is most convenient form of communication. Also - thanks to all kind of text tools You were able to understand all those messages, and to be honest - I also used Google Translate to make them. Medium is important. My point is the text itselft, each letter, is kind of picture. We learned that particular pictures can be placed together and they will represent some words. We make tools which can write in those pictures allowing us to communicate. Author of this post make difference between pictures and text. And of course - on simple level - there is obvious difference. But using more metathinking about communication - text, letters, signs like in japanese or jidish, are in fact simplified images. We just made them usable at different way than paintings or ilustrations and called it "text".
No, text isn't picture. Pictures are just one representation of text for particular purpose. Text can be touch (brail script), sound(when you use screen reader), and to programs text is just a sequence of numbers.
The important thing about text is the restriced set of possible symbols and their compositions, and close correspondence of them to meaning (much closer than with general images, video, etc).