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Originally Posted by Namekuseijin
Ever heard of voice? Who needs to read what someone said when you can simply listen to one saying it? This is a first in mankind's history: that you can listen to Homer instead of reading a tome about it.
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On the contrary, Homer was orginally read out loud. If you could go back to ancient Greece, you would be far more likely to hear a poet reciting Homer than you would to find a text copy. But what of it? People still read Shakespeare, even though it is meant to be seen rather than read, and people have ample opportunities to see Shakespeare, they can watch movies, videos and plays. In the summer, I can go to the park and watch it being performed.
Yet watching Shakespeare doesn't result in people reading it less, if anything people who watch it performed tend to read it more than those who don't watch it. There are real advantages to reading that video, audio or live performance do not provide. With those, it's here and gone, it's clumsy to pause and reverse. With text, you can take your time to think about the material.
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Of course, it's a different medium! Same from video to book, actually losing more detail.
Let us not focus on difficulty in conversion between media here.
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We're not talking about conversion loss, we're talking about inherent limitations. Video is very good at showing what things look like, but lack the depth of a book. A novelization of a movie can have more depth than the movie did, because the book can go into more detail than the movie could.
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what makes you think the same is true in a device in your hands? In the movie theather, perhaps, not in your tablet. Go forward, back, slow mo. I think it's a stupid way to watch a movie, but they do put controls under your fingertips after all.
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Forward and reverse are not new technologies. They are clumsy and crude. It's much easier to refer to text earlier in the book than it is to refer to something earlier in a video.
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Faithful audiovisual data storage is something as recent as some 200 years ago. Photographs almost 200 years and temporal data that needed mechanical means of reproduction only when electricity came up some 120 years ago, thus movies and audio. Until then, only pictures and second-hand accounts via written records or oral traditions.
We actually devised a written system for music in western sheetmusic, but even it isn't as accurate as a recording of a musician actually performing and we have no real clue how, say, Bach playing the harpsichord actually sounded. Did he play with loose tempo, akin to jazz musicians? Or did it really sound like a soulless computer as current classical performers strive to?
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Yet we still use photographs, even when we have "superior" technology like video. Even if we could have audio recording of how Bach played, sheet music is still highly useful for people learning how to play the works.
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Point is, we have far better recording tools now than pencil and paper. Let's not weep for it.
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No, we don't. We don't have different tools, and while they have advantages, they also have disadvantages.