“I think what we’re seeing here is just laziness, and not some generational paradigm shift.”

Absolutely. I mean people will probably speak to text, before they switch to video. People don’t want to watch video just to get a single shred of knowledge they’re looking for. It’s amusing how long most of the videos are on Youtube, with the creator just taking FOREVER to get to the grain of truth.

I couldn’t agree more with the article. I also strongly believe text is the way to go most of the time.
Video, audio, every medium has its own strengths and weaknesses but text should rule them all in the web. Unfortunately, reading requires focus that demands few to non distractions. See the post on why we can’t read anymore

Ranting is special because anyone can rant for hours on a particular topic but if you want to write about it you can’t do it for too long. I learned this when I was listening to TotalBiscuit rant about a particular subject for around 20 minutes, but his core message wasn’t long or complicated.

Text is the upper limit of human expression: when done well, it provides fast, succinct and direct information. Sadly, it also requires focus and alone time, two commodities that are becoming more and more scarce.

A few months ago Jacek Dukaj published a very interesting text about the future of reading and writing in the Gazeta Książki magazine. You should check it. It’s quite in tune with some of the things you’re saying here. On an unrelated note, are you going to review the Old Axolotl? It’s Dukaj’s first novel available in English translation.

Maybe the YouTube rant people just mostly use phones and tablets and can’t type quickly on a keyboard? Still, if you want to get your thoughts out there, you should probably learn to use it.

And I’m imagining a speech-interface for vim now:
“double-yoo double-yoo dee two double-yoo…”

@ IceBrain:

Very true. The privacy angle is an especially good point. And it’s not just for teenagers. The whole idea of pin numbers and passwords is that we can enter them silently in public without revealing them to the world. Without keyboards the mainstay of our digital security simply vanish and we would have to settle on much less secure physical tokens (which can be stolen) and biometrics (which can likely be sampled and duplicated from the stolen token).

I think in Her they had little touch tablets for “finger editing” though they rarely used them. You can actually see them in the picture above, when the protagonist’s friend shows him her game. So I think you’re on to something here.

But yeah, editing with fingers is also clumsy on iOS. It’s the combination of “fat fingers”, small text requiring precision movements. Most of the time you have to kinda rock your finger back and forward to actually get the cursor where it needs to go. You can tap to select a word or a paragraph, and then iOS gives you handles you can use to narrow down the selection from both sides, which works but is nowhere near as practical as mouse highlighting.

Then of course keyboard and mouse interfaces are also flawed, which is why we have things like vim that allow for very efficient keyboard only navigation, and manipulation.

And of course vim interface is flawed because the text objects which include characters, words, sentences and sentence chunks are always too granular or not granular enough to grab the exact amount of text you need right now in a single command. :P

Nah, I don’t think text is dead. I’ll bet you that bellow that video of the guy in the bathtub, there are hundreds -if not thousands- of written comments. Text is still the low effort option for small posts and comments, not to mention the private option – can you picture teenagers dictating their messages when near their parents or teachers? I don’t think it’ll disappear until we get something better than dictation to replace it.

I do think most people won’t write long-form posts, but then again, they already didn’t. A person with a blog, or who writes a Medium post, is and has always been an exception.

Video blogs are like IRC and the early social web; it seems shocking that so many people can’t write, but the technology didn’t cause that inability, it just exposed what was previously hidden from public.

That said, I don’t agree that editing text with speech must be a nightmare. Or actually, editing text just with speech might be a nightmare, but a better combination can be found with touch screens + speech, without having to type. You just select, drag and delete using your fingers, and then use speech to replace or add content.
Right now, the Android UI is terrible for that (I don’t know if iOS is any better), but that’s just a software issue. It’s likely that there’s already some decent app for editing text.