• guitars are real@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Watching videos is like an order of magnitude easier than reading for large swathes of the population. Fully 18% of the US adult population is functionally illiterate – they can pass a reading test, but their reading level is so low it hardly matters. These folks can still watch YouTube/Dystopian Vine (sorry, TikTok).

    Also, this much is just my own speculation, but A/V media is a lot easier to push people’s emotional buttons with because it’s much, much faster and easier to consume content via video and we’re likely hardwired to pay more attention to audio/visual stimuli than abstract imagery in our heads. A video+audio track of an explosion is always going to hit people harder than a careful description of the same explosion, and if people expect it to be easier and to provide a larger emotional impact, they’re more likely to go for the thing that makes them feel something more easily.

    We are all governed by dopamine more than we like to admit.

    • tko@tkohhh.social
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      1 year ago

      because it’s much, much faster and easier to consume content via video

      That totally depends on the content. Using your example, yes, a video of an explosion is going be much more efficient than a block of text about the same explosion. But for something like this, I find it MUCH slower to try to glean the relevant information from a video than from an article. An article can be skimmed easily so I only have to focus on the parts that I care about. Skimming a video, on the other hand, is a pain. Also, if the content is a step-by-step how-to, the video might be OK as long as I can follow along in real time. However, if I have to keep pausing and going back to rewatch a section, then an article is going to be easier to work with.