A Curmudgeon's Opinion
On Most Steemit Videos
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@denmarkguy
recently posted
Video is Pushing Aside Writing... and Sometimes That REALLY Annoys Me!
I pretty much agree with what he said and you can see my reply if you go there.
However...it got me to thinking.
It is said..that a picture is worth a thousand words. I believe that to be true.
It would then follow that a video would be worth a a great deal more...perhaps a million?
I don't THINK so. Not in the great majority of cases.
Why?
Well settle back and I'll tell you.
Writing and Speaking use two different parts of the brain. Neither one of which is under full control of your conscious ego. Have you ever said something then wondered 'where the hell did THAT come from?"
The old adage is true..."engage your brain before you speak'. The ancients have spoken about that very thing since the beginning of time.
If you sit down and write something, either on paper (remember that?) or on your computer...you actually have to THINK about it for a little bit and you have the opportunity to edit, erase or just give it up as a bad job.
NOT so when speaking...What is said can NOT be unsaid...what is heard the same.
Not only that..but MOST people are really bad at public speaking. Willam F. Buckley Jr. comes to mind. He was a brillaint man. Possible a genius..but he suxed at public speaking .
Not only THAT...but why would I want to listen to someone speak via podcast, or worse yet WATCH them speak via video, when I could read the same thing in one tenth the time. Speaking is SLOW. I'm a Texan...I know. I type faster than I speak...and the very act of typing forces me to THINK about the words being used.
uh...aw..well...duh...snort...and other null sounds don't make the grade. No one writes that down...almost everyone says it when speaking.
When the rubber meets the road...a televised speech is just plain STOOPID. Video has SO much more potential than just showing us, form afar, something similar to what the Greeks five hundred years ago( or Ug the caveman a million years ago) could see up close.
Video, to be done right, should SHOW us what can not be expressed easily in words. If a picture is worth a thousand words...a (well done) video SHOULD be worth a million.
And that...dear kiddies...is why I seldom watch videos and especially not TV.
Now get off my lawn!
I can't remember what most of the talking heads try to tell me. I'll easily remember this post and many others. Even comments from people. I read their comments, I remember what they said. A friend called me up yesterday... today, I have no clue what the hell he was talking about. Ice fishing something or other.
sounds like visual memory to me.
Definition of curmudgeon. 1 : a crusty, ill-tempered, and usually old man. 2 archaic : miser. —
🤣 Crusty!!
yup...pretty much.
I had to sit down and digest this post before thinking in my comment. Yes you are right, good videos are worth MILLIONS, but crappy ones don't even are worth your time, and creating a good video takes a lot of time and it is not easily fix once done.
While you can just open a document in your computer and change anything that you don't like, or even better, you can skip to the end any bad comment without wasting your time, something that it is not so easily done in a video.
So yeah in resume, I agree with you 100%, because I also stopped watching T.V. a long time ago, and now i use most of my free time for reading, as it is more engaging and hold much detailed information, as the quality of the work is vastly superior to other media.
Nevertheless, i wouldn't discard all videos as not worth your time, there are good people that still make great content and with great effort, using videos as a media.
ah, but have you ever tried using a rowing machine and reading?
can't argue about crap being out there though..cut the cable long time ago
very interesting - and valid point...
the two mediums are interpreted differently.
Both have their own strengths...
All well said and agree with.
Old saying was s**t or get off the pot.
I like it! Now you should tell us what you really think...(just kidding).
I have not read @denmarkguy's post yet but will.
To me video and videos are mostly a tool to keep the thought processes on slow mode, and often misrepresent the truth. Sometimes I am interested in the truth, sometimes I just really do not give a sh** as to what is true or not.
What is the more powerful media? A picture that paints a thousand words? A video that paints a million words? Ask yourself, why these comparisons? Why compare the visual to the written? Could it be that the written conveys so so much more than the visual?
A picture paints a thousand words, yet with a well written 1,000 words, how many pictures have been painted in the mind of the reader. How many 8 hour long movies are there out there? A well written story is a visual experience for me, I see the story as the words unfold it. I see the story. I may not see it the way the Author meant it to be seen, but when I read it is no different than watching a movie, with a few exceptions, when I watch a movie, I do not feel how soft the grass is how sharp the bayonet grass is, I do not smell how horrid the stench from the rotting corpse is, I do not hear the mosquitoes buzzing around my head, I do not taste the salt air as it blows across the sand dunes of the inlet sea. Those things I do not get from a movie, but from reading, when I read I am 100% fully invested in the story.
Well that's just me, give me a good book over a famous painting or movie any day.
writing uses a different part of the brain than speaking..
perhaps reading uses a different part of the brain than watching a video or viewing a painting?
seems logical.
Greetings my friend, I follow him from Venezuela and I always enjoy his post, blessings brother!
Who ever said a picture is worth a thousand words must have been a crap narrator. I'm both an amateur scetch artist and an amateur short story author of well, rather dense fiction, and I couldn't possibly sketch in one picture what I can write in a thousand words piece of flash fiction . And I certainly couldn't condense a 7k short story into a mere seven sketches.
I'm personally privy to the idea that a picture "augments" a thousand words in a way no "additional" amount of words could. A picture without (at least) a thousand words isn't worth a thousand words. A picture "plus" a thousand words though can be worth much more, as, like you said, different parts of the brain, that when brought together can work magic.
Add "spoken" word to the equation, spoken by a good voice artist, and add an extra layer of augmentation , add an other function of the brain to add to the magic.
As for video and augmentation of a thousand words? Well, "two" words that when mentioned are worth more than a thousand pictures, at least to me: "David Attenborough" 😉
I beg to disagree.
imagine a picture...of say.. a boy and a girl in a canoe in a swamp with frogs, birds and snakes..
That's the general paramaters..
NOW...describe it in words down to EVERY TINY detail so that someone could accurately replicate that picture from your words...(don't forget the ants...and the size, texture, and direction of the cracks in the bark on the trees..or the length of EACH tendril of moss hanging down...or the EXACT color and variation of the hues of illumination of every INCH of the lake..
you think you can do that in a thousand words?
consider...a typical picture...a jpeg...consists of a MILLION bytes of information (or more depending on many factors.)...consider a byte to be a word.
Now imagine the boy was just bitten by a few of the ants, it hurts like hell but he doesn't want the girl to know. The girl senses there is something up and being highly insecure she is now so afraid the boy is about to break up with her that she completely forgets about her fear of hippopotamuses lurking beneath the dark surface of the water that the boy tried to convince her the waters were too shallow to house. The image is static and without context. As such the descriptive power of the image is limited. And next to that, if my wife looks at that picture of a swamp, all she sees is a boring old swamp with two young people, when she sees a snake, swimming in the general direction of the kids, the snake and the Kidd's will be all she sees, worrying the snake might bite the boy. She wouldn't look at any of the trees, birds or frogs, just the kids and the snake. When I'll look at the picture, the first thing I might notice might be the striped kingfisher, then I might wonder about the trees, where could this wonderful place be? When you look at the picture, you might see the swamp you used to go fishing as a kid. The picture might trigger childhood memories, giving meaning to the picture no-one else could see. The point, without a narrative providing context, the image would tell a different thousand words story to each of us, making the image completely ineffective at telling the story the painter, photographer or sketch artist attempted to capture
I think we are talking past each other.
I'm talking about one thing...you are referring to something else.
Thought we were talking about "boy and a girl in a canoe in a swamp with frogs, birds and snakes". Your view is a picture of the boy/girl/swamp would tell more about the boy/girl/swamp than a thousand words could. I tried to argue that actually 1) a thousand words could tell much more about the boy/girl/swamp than the picture could and 2) the things a narrative free picture tells one person could differ greatly from what it would tell the next person.
But while I don't think we are talking about different things, seems we are not going to come to any kind of consensus on this one and we might just want to agree to disagree on this subject.
you may be right