Quote:
Originally Posted by Over
- Reading a book is more time consuming than other mediums (a 50 minute tv documentary can transmit you the same info that would take you a day rading, for example)
- Unlike internet, and like TV and radio, books are a non-interactive medium. You can just swallow information.
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I have to disagree very strongly with these two statements.
1- I think that books are a much more efficient way to transmit information. The number of hard facts you get even in a high quality 50 minute documentary (and those are few and far between) doesn't come close to how much you can learn in 50 minutes of reading.
2- The fact that the Internet is a
potentially interactive medium does not make it any less full of B/S. There is also a lot of very useful and rich information there, but it's not necessarily interactive except for the fact that you have to look for it, and spend time assessing its reliability. As I said earlier, it's all up to the reader. If you just sit here swallowing everything you hear or read, then you will get the wrong thing out of either books, the Net or TV.
Unlike TV or radio, books allow me to absorb information in my own time, to take the time to go back and re-read a sentence, to go even further back and check it against that other sentence two chapters earlier that seems to contradict it. And now of course, to stop and access the web to put what the author states in perspective. This is the reason why I will always prefer reading to watching a documentary or listening to radio or a podcast. Although both of these can be interesting, for me reading is the only comfortable and reliable way to absorb information. And I mean information, not just impressions or emotional judgments.
I like to put some distance between the opinions of others and mine, and for me the written words is the best way to achieve this. I don't see any difference between the Net and books, except that books go through the hands of editors and publishers, and are slightly less likely to contain utter lies than the Net is.