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Always Bet on Text (2014)

graydon2.dreamwidth.org

71–80 of 349 posts

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#71
Case in point: text messaging. Quoting the Spolsky ('Not Just Usability', 2004) speaking about "social user interfaces."

Many humans are less inhibited when they’re typing than when they are speaking face-to-face. Teenagers are less shy. With cellphone text messages, they’re more likely to ask each other out on dates. That genre of software was so successful socially that it’s radically improving millions of people’s love lives (or at least their social calendars). Even though text messaging has a ghastly user interface, it became extremely popular with the kids. The joke of it is that there’s a much better user interface built into every cellphone for human to human communication: this clever thing called “phone calls.”

It's not just dates. It's "How ru?" & "running 3m late" and such. This has advanced to where text messaging is now a distinct written dialect, unintelligible to someone from 1993. Meanwhile, voice messages and such are more peripheral... even though they now work through the same UIs and we all have earpieces in our ears anyway. Text is powerful.

That said, text is not always the most powerful media. Photos/selfies and such have become a major 1-to-1 communication medium too. I often find that a phone conversation way more efficient than an email chain.

I also think there are categories of writing that shouldn't be. "Number articles" where an article is describing a company's financial's, for example. A lot of newspapers try to describe a table in essay form. The table would be better. That is still text though, in the sense that this article uses the term.

Choosing the most powerful medium or submedium is crucially important.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#72
This discussion right here is all text. Imagine if it was pictures instead. Imagine representing any of the comments in form of a picture. Won't be one picture representing a 1000 words. May be the another truth is that "a word is worth a 1000 pictures".

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#74

> text is the most powerful, useful, effective communication technology ever, period. On the other hand, many (technical/mathematical) concepts are more effectively explained using diagrams/images. E.g. the very visual approach taken in Mathologer videos [1] makes difficult, esoteric, mathematical ideas accessible to a wider audience. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJ8pnCO0nTY

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 speak English?

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#75
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emojis evolved from simple text like ":)" or ":/". And for the new set of emojis, half the time I am not sure what the sentiment is being expressed!

Add to that that, depending on the emoji font, the emoji will look completely different[0]. So as the sender you have no guarantee that the recipient of your message will actually interpret your emoji as you intended. It really is beyond me why the Unicode consortium thought that putting emojis in a character set would be a good idea. Sure, having a code point in your character set that represents a bird[1] makes sen…

Emoji are modern hieroglyphs. It's just an additional means of conveying meaning.

> font designers now have control over the way I get to express my emotions

This could have been a major issue, but media platforms recognized it and have provided their own pictograms for years, mostly compatible with each other.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#76

Case in point: text messaging. Quoting the Spolsky ('Not Just Usability', 2004) speaking about "social user interfaces." Many humans are less inhibited when they’re typing than when they are speaking face-to-face. Teenagers are less shy. With cellphone text messages, they’re more likely to ask each other out on dates. That genre of software was so successful socially that it’s radically improving millions of people’s…

> Many humans are less inhibited when they’re typing than when they are speaking face-to-face.

Spolsky was right about this when he wrote that passage in 2004.

We should take seriously the idea that the lesser inhibition of textual communication has been a drawback on net, at least over the last 17 years.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#77
post #66
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the author has mislabeled "text". What are characters if not pictures? What is text if not a sequence of pictures? What's a picture if not a depiction of a concept? In a bag-of-words type of model, I see no difference between a word and a painting, no difference between the body of work of van Gogh and the body of work of Kafka. They both use multiple sets of concepts to compose new sets of concepts. Pic…

The medium of your reply contradicts the content.

That's a beautiful sentence, especially in this here context, but it flew over my head. Would you care to expand?

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#78
post #63

Text is not the oldest - nor easiest to use -, text is a heavy abstraction born somewhat recently in human history. The oldest and easiest is the visual in 3D, then comes the visual in 2D. Those exist since we have eyes. Our brain have dedicated and sizeable infrastructure for that. Children can communicate in 3D (gestures, posture, expressions, objects) and in 2D drawings before learning textural communication with…

The reason human knowledge develops so fast is the existence of text. If we rely on visual in 3D we will be the same as other animals. Apparently now we are behaving badly since we are consuming videos and pictures rather than text. I believe text is superior because of its abstraction, when you read, you are creating alongside the author.

So true

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#80
post #57
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [edit: unfortunately hackernews doesn't display the unicode character U+1F426] That got a good chuckle out of me. It actually shows how there's not just "text".

It is just text (using Unicode nomenclature). The makers of the HN software deliberately broke the functionality in an obnoxious fashion.

They weren't obnoxious, just subscribed to a more restricted interpretation of "text" than yourself, and to which many people seem to agree.

It's clearly a continuum from 3D objects, to pictures, to icons and ideographs, to highly abstract sings representing words and ultimately sounds. That fact that some designer of character sets decided to put the limit somewhere and include a bird icon and not an Obama icon does not invalidate other interpretations.

By the way, there is a thing called Emojicon where a character for 'Albert Einstein' was proposed as valid 'text'.

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