Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Web developer amongst other things

The Death of Text?

Facebook is touting video as the next big thing for their platform. However, Tim Carmody points to a number of benefits of the written word.

Text is surprisingly resilient. It's cheap, it's flexible, it's discreet. Human brains process it absurdly well considering there's nothing really built-in for it. Plenty of people can deal with text better than they can spoken language, whether as a matter of preference or necessity. And it's endlessly computable -- you can search it, code it. You can use text to make it do other things.

Facebook is wrong, text is deathless by Tim Carmody for Kottke.org