always bet on text

[graydon2]

I figured I should just post this somewhere so I can make future reference to how I feel about the matter, anytime someone asks me about such-and-such video, 3D, game or "dynamic" multimedia system. Don't get me wrong, I like me some illustrations, photos, movies and music.

But text wins by a mile. Text is everything. My thoughts on this are quite absolute: text is the most powerful, useful, effective communication technology ever, period.

Text is the oldest and most stable communication technology (assuming we treat speech/signing as natural phenomenon -- there are no human societies without it -- whereas textual capability has to be transmitted, taught, acquired) and it's incredibly durable. We can read texts from five thousand years ago, almost the moment they started being produced. It's (literally) "rock solid" -- you can readily inscribe it in granite that will likely outlast the human species.

Text is the most flexible communication technology. Pictures may be worth a thousand words, when there's a picture to match what you're trying to say. But let's hit the random button on wikipedia and pick a sentence, see if you can draw a picture to convey it, mm? Here:

"Human rights are moral principles or norms that describe certain standards of human behaviour, and are regularly protected as legal rights in national and international law."

Not a chance. Text can convey ideas with a precisely controlled level of ambiguity and precision, implied context and elaborated content, unmatched by anything else. It is not a coincidence that all of literature and poetry, history and philosophy, mathematics, logic, programming and engineering rely on textual encodings for their ideas.

Text is the most efficient communication technology. By orders of magnitude. This blog post is likely to take perhaps 5000 bytes of storage, and could compress down to maybe 2000; by comparison the following 20-pixel-square image of the silhouette of a tweeting bird takes 4000 bytes: . At every step of communication technology, textual encoding comes first, everything else after. Because it's vastly cheaper on a symbol-by-symbol basis. You have a working optical telegraph network running in 1790 in France. You the better part of a century of electrical telegraphy, trans-oceanic cables and everything, before anyone bothers with trying to carry voice. You have decades of teleprinter and text-only computer networking, mail and news, chat and publishing, editing and diagnostics, before bandwidth gets cheap enough for images, voice and video. You have pagers, SMS, WAP, USSD and blackberries before iPhones. You have Teletext and BBSs, netnews and gopher before the web. And today many of the best, and certainly the most efficient parts of the web remain text-centric. I can download all of wikipedia and carry it around on the average smartphone.

Text is the most socially useful communication technology. It works well in 1:1, 1:N, and M:N modes. It can be indexed and searched efficiently, even by hand. It can be translated. It can be produced and consumed at variable speeds. It is asynchronous. It can be compared, diffed, clustered, corrected, summarized and filtered algorithmically. It permits multiparty editing. It permits branching conversations, lurking, annotation, quoting, reviewing, summarizing, structured responses, exegesis, even fan fic. The breadth, scale and depth of ways people use text is unmatched by anything. There is no equivalent in any other communication technology for the social, communicative, cognitive and reflective complexity of a library full of books or an internet full of postings. Nothing else comes close.

So this is my stance on text: always pick text first. As my old boss might have said: always bet on text. If you can use text for something, use it. It will very seldom let you down.

Comments

All of the above, plus…

[hivehand]

Everything you say is true; even so, you leave out one point that’s crucially important, at least to me: text is also the most efficient technology when it comes to bridging that last gap between the computer and the human mind. 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.

[tylerneely]

I disagree that "Text is the most efficient communication technology" and "Text is the most socially useful communication technology" in many scenarios, and I feel that this stance among engineers is detrimental to the information exchange:human time ratio of users held captive by the constraints we impose on so much of their lives.

Text is incredibly efficient for computers to store, but storage is cheap, and is a constraint that will continue to open up in the foreseeable future. A far more precious resource is human time. I feel that text is not particularly efficient for many types of human-to-human communication, particularly those that are synchronous.

An SMS conversation with someone who you've not had any previous shared context with will often result in much miscommunication and wasted time contemplating possible interpretations. Logistical planning is often far more quickly settled with a brief voice conversation than a tedious back-and-forth email thread. I think that maybe anything involving several round-trip transfers of information (basically anything you used to call a conversation before people settled on a massive overhead increase for the occasional benefits of asynchrony) is better handled through something involving voice.

I often find myself frustrated when I am unable to just have a video chat with a colleague for a few minutes, rather than spending time to consider many possible misinterpretations of text information that you wish to transmit electronically in an asynchronous manner. Having a video or voice chat allows for "optimistic ambiguity resolution" whereas with text you often need to take a pessimistic, higher overhead approach. I don't feel that my typing is dramatically slower than speaking, but I often will pause for a moment to interpret the meaning of a typed message, where if we were having a face-to-face communication more context may be communicated through hand motions, tone of voice, a whiteboard, etc... I don't pause to consider an interpretation or a response as often with a non-text communication channel.

Text is durable, machine-friendly and cheap to store, but it's not a good vehicle for high-fidelity bidirectional interpersonal interaction. I feel that it has outlived its welcome as a stopgap in many applications we rely on constantly.

Thanks for the article!

[graydon2]

I disagree. Even assuming you mean efficiency-of-human time (my use of "efficiency" related to coding-efficiency, but whatever): you're using the concepts of efficiency in only 1:1 and realtime forms; but I can scan and summarize and search text in ways I can't with a/v, and these all make my time as a human better-spent. I consume far more text in a day from sources who aren't here and with whom I'm not having a 1:1 conversation with. And I produce more text for people who will come later, who similarly need access to it without using my time or wanting to plod through my production.

Same with measures of "social utility". You're focused on 1:1, synchronous social interactions. As soon as you have 10 people trying to talk at once (or god help you, 1000 as in some IRC channels or mailing lists) and/or any significant delay between producer and consumer, you're absolutely sunk with a/v. I'll admit there exist cases where an a/v interaction is a bit quicker and more nimble than a textual one, and there are cases where (say) nuance or negotiation requires emotional tone that's harder to convey in text; but in aggregate, summed across all the millions of technologically-mediated social interactions, I believe text is massively ahead of all its competitors.

[tylerneely]

I believe that you may consume more text than most. We should avoid creating systems that are optimized for the usage patterns of their creators alone. Why do tumblr users bother to post images or videos when text is an option? (I use the example because I spent a bit of time trying to optimize their ability to communicate.) This sample may be more image-centric than the general population, or maybe not, but the fact that both images and text were frequently among the most popular forms of information exchanged there makes me suspect that text is not heavily favored for 1:N or N:M social interaction online. These were not just porn (11%) and regurgitated memes but quite often communications and conversations about social justice, art, self-expression, etc... which spanned language barriers without mechanical translation. The largest social media sites tend to be quite image heavy. If text is so asymmetrically advantageous for general communication, it would seem that there is an incredible optimization opportunity :)

[graydon2]

Tumblr users communicate their emotions, primarily for social bonding and aesthetic enjoyment rather than idea-communication, and and do so via collage and resharing. And yes, it does tend to work across languages, total advantage to images there. I'm not saying images have no advantages (see second sentence of original post).

I love tumblr, but the precision and ability to articulate new ideas you yourself want to convey via such an image-share is significantly lower than text. If you wanted to have the conversation you're having here with me via tumblr-image, you couldn't. If you don't have an image to reshare and you don't have something directly in front of you to photograph, images are extremely laborious to compose. Indeed, when people want to put an exact idea into an image, they overlay rendered text on it via catmacro or screencap subtitle or whatever. The images alone don't say what needs saying.

All the annoying arguments on facebook are via text. Buzzfeed listicles are via text. I'm not talking some sort of highbrow position of the literati. SMS and chat services are by far the highest share of screentime on most mobiles. People love photographs of things immediately in front of them, of course -- far more emotional salience and far higher bandwidth than a text -- but most things you need to say, you don't have a photo for and can't say via imagery.

Anyway we're going around in circles and I do not have a blog in order to be heckled by strangers. I'm kinda tired of restating my thesis. You disagree. I get it. Go enjoy image-land. 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.