There is a saying "a picture is worth a thousand words". The brain will recognize a white flurry cat from an image faster than from a phrase "white flurry cat".
Always Bet on Text (2014)
141–150 of 349 posts
Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)
#142The question is whether these advantages are because text is a better communication medium, or because of the limitations of our technology? Take using a computer to type a word versus draw a picture: Effectively everyone who uses a computer can type a word, but I'd bet less than 10% could draw a circle. But put a piece of paper in front of someone and effectively everyone can draw a circle. This points to there bein…
A circle doesn't usually convey very many ideas, though. Words can.
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◠Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah come on, this is not accurate at all. We have tons of tech now: audio, video, charting, etc. Circles are pretty easy in powerpoint or any such software. The tech is obviously here already. But still, why do people prefer sending chat texts instead of calling or video calling? Surely not because of tech.
Actually I would argue that people send texts despite it often being highly inefficient. It often takes an infuriating amount of text messages to agree on something that would only take a 2min call. It's just we're so used to sending chats.
Chat has other advantages. Lets say you're trying to agree on a restaurant for dinner:
- If I'm busy right now I don't need to stop what I'm doing to answer the call, or you don't need to try again later.
- Need 2 minutes to look up your schedule and suggest a time or find a restaurant? That's fine, I can do something else until you reply and you don't feel like you need to rush the process.
- 6 hours later I forgot which restaurant we agreed on? It's ok, just open the chat, it's right there.
- The chat is searchable, if 2 months later I don't remember the restaurant name I can probably find in a few seconds by searching some related keywords like "food", "restaurant", "dinner", etc.
Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)
#144> “Pictures may be worth a thousand words, when there's a picture to match what you're trying to say.”
The author is saying that because pictures cannot easily capture arbitrary sentences, text is better. But the same applies with the roles reversed: text cannot capture arbitrary pictures! Instead of saying that one is better than the other outright, let’s move to media (for reading, composing, and programming) where the two can be intermingled appropriately, with as little friction as possible. We certainly have the technology for it...
Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)
#145I love Emacs and plain text. But claiming that text is everything is ignoring the power of images. The brain can immediately grasp the meaning of an image, visuals are immediately understood, some of the most remarkable things human beings have created is art, that is visual imagery.
Just because our current technology is best able to handle and deal with text says nothing about the power of sound, images, sketches, drawings and handwritten notes.
Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah come on, this is not accurate at all. We have tons of tech now: audio, video, charting, etc. Circles are pretty easy in powerpoint or any such software. The tech is obviously here already. But still, why do people prefer sending chat texts instead of calling or video calling? Surely not because of tech.
No, GP is right, for a simple reason: look at your input devices. A keyboard and mouse/touchpad combo is most effective at interacting with text. The story would be entirely different if the main interface was e.g. a stylus. A instant messaging service that sends hand written scribbles instead of text follows much more naturally from that.
Some of us are on a desktop computer, all of us are on a mobile phone.
You do realize how cumbersome that mobile keyboard is right. With a click of a button, you can record audio and/or video.
But still, text messages rule them all.
Who sends texts on desktops anyway? A small minority.
Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)
#147The question is whether these advantages are because text is a better communication medium, or because of the limitations of our technology? Take using a computer to type a word versus draw a picture: Effectively everyone who uses a computer can type a word, but I'd bet less than 10% could draw a circle. But put a piece of paper in front of someone and effectively everyone can draw a circle. This points to there bein…
It is not plausible that, but for the limitations of technology, you could substitute a picture for the argument presented in your post.
Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah come on, this is not accurate at all. We have tons of tech now: audio, video, charting, etc. Circles are pretty easy in powerpoint or any such software. The tech is obviously here already. But still, why do people prefer sending chat texts instead of calling or video calling? Surely not because of tech.
Wikipedia's List of codecs page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_codecs ) is a good example of the explosion of complexity that arises when representing media digitally. To this day, this complexity is still mostly offloaded to users in the form of export settings, and supported playback formats. One basic requirement of the technology reaching the point good media support is if a user never encounters codecs,…
My kids have no idea what a codec is. Still they record and play videos and audio messages all the time.
I don't know in which world or time you are living, it's been a long time since I touch anything related to codecs.
Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
They have a valid point, however. What is now widely considered to be a "water gun" emoji started out as an actual gun, but Apple decided at one point that they were going to be "progressive" and changed it to a water gun. To me, this upends the entire idea of emoji having a stable definition.
Words don't have stable definitions either. My point was that there is nothing special about emojis any more than there is about Chinese characters or Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Sure, but in the case of words, both sender and recipient at least agree about the content of the message, even if their interpretation is different.
In the case of emojis, both the sender's and the recipient's software agree on the message content but the actual persons no longer do because the content is suddenly being displayed very differently.
Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also where does text end and diagrams/images start? E.g where does musical notation stand? For an untrained eye it is just a bunch of lines, dots and squiggles but others will read it like text and much more efficiently so than if it were written words. Similarly the example about the Wikipedia text of human rights being supposedly impossible to convey via image. But what does the text convey to you if you don’t spea…
Also, what does it convey if translated into (say) Egyptian hieroglyphs, if you're an ancient Egyptian who can read hieroglyphs...
Hieroglyph writers have to resort to tricks like punning to express ideas that are not simple pictures. There's a reason why written language became more abstract.