As a fast reader (though not as fast as you), I have never thought of it this way, and have been guilty of forgetting that not everyone processes things the same way as I do. This is a good mind-opening thought on why the radio shows and television news are so popular.

Thanks for letting me see it from a different perspective.

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You read 1.5 times faster than I do - actually a bit more. You've read 97 books this year (so far) and I have read 60. My partner has read about 30.

He definitely likes the newspaper, but gets more info in a short amount of time from NPR. I do too.

This is a good theory.

N.

Edited at 2007-12-27 07:14 pm (UTC)

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Unless you and theferrett spent approximately the same number of hours reading every day, that's not an accurate calculation.

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If you want to be very pendantic about it, sure. But I have read his journal entries where he briefly discussed how many books he read in a single day, and having had a single day to *just read*, I still didn't read as much as he did textwise.

I think for an off the cuff evaluation, it's good enough.

N.

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It's definitely hard to measure speed of reading, especially when trying to control for comprehension. I tend to go for measurements like, "Order of the Phoenix arrived Saturday around 11, I read it by 9 or so." and "Deathly Hallows took a bit over a day to read."

But really, it depends. Some re-reads take longer than the initial read because I'm savoring the sentence construction or descriptions or repartee. I can't even say that fiction is faster than nonfiction because readability varies, prior knowledge varies, etc. Inside the Victorian Home was rather quick. My reading speed for the essays in Best Software Writing I were all over the map :)

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I wonder, will print make a comeback as our mobile devices get bigger screens and automatically log in to Wi-Fi? After all, much of the reason people don't read all of the newspaper is because A) they claim not to have time and B) people prefer to get just the news they want instead of shelling out for a paper they won't read half of.

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Or will mobile devices just provide another access to the growing number of video sources that are invading the 'net? I am continually irritated by wanting information but not being to find a text version of a story.

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I know the idea of VOD and streaming video gives Hollywood a case of the drools but I honestly think it won't be effective. Maybe in the case of music videos and very brief interludes, but every attempt to launch a miniature "video content system" has essentially failed. Even iTunes makes far more money off of music than it does off of video.

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In this country. In other countries (India, for example) people are watching whole television shows and movies on their cellphones, and laughing at us for being so "behind."

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I've heard that argument, but if you look at the numbers, it's only sustainable for Bollywood because their budgets are comparatively low and their audience is huge compared to Hollywood's. Hollywood can piggyback on that system but I notice home video isn't exactly dying in India. Hell, even in the market where it makes by far the most sense, Japan, it's not as popular as market data has led people to believe.

This is only a good thing. VOD is pure evil.

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In one of my other blogs I'm doing a series of short essays called 10 Ways to take a Stand Against Ignorance, and one of the comments I made was that one shouldn't rely on "the media" as one's sole source of information on current events.

I also suggested that people subscribe to "The Week," for which I need to thank you, Ferrett, for telling me about it in the first place. :)

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Could you be more specific? "The Media" is awfully vague.

Personally, I'd just rather people sought out sources that don't agree with their political views all the time and think critically about everything they're told.

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Television and radio have to compress everything into quick sound bites. Web pages compress things into one or two screens. You can't get any kind of real understanding if everything gets cut down to fit between the ads.

I made much the same comment about not being part of "the choir" that's being preached-to, and paying better attention to the opinions we disagree with than getting everything secondhand, filtered through someone else's biases.

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Television and radio have to compress everything into quick sound bites. Web pages compress things into one or two screens.

That strikes me as a bit oversimplified. It's true TV and radio have time constraints (and commercial pressures), but a good news producer can assemble a clear, informative segment if he's doing his job right. Also, most of the major newspapers just reproduce their articles online, regardless of size.

Personally, I've always thought video would be best served on the Internet if it came with proper footnotes, like an academic paper. Listing unbiased sources of more information would be a useful feature.

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Don't forget that you can also do other things while the television or radio is on. For example, you could cook or exercise. You simply can't do the same while reading.

So even if the information density is less, adding in the gain from the other activities can make radio/video more valuable than the higher information density of reading.

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This is why, with my busy schedule, I am conflicted between listening to NPR in the car or listening to an audio book.

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Hey, you get the choice. (At least, I assume audio books don't put you to sleep :)

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I can't listen to them on really long trips, but the 45 minutes to Akron is fine.

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At home, audio books have looking for something to do - usually to read - within 5 minutes. (Yeah, I know it sounds insane.)

In the car, audio books have me annoyed or drifting off within 5 minutes.

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I can't do audiobooks at home, either, except when I'm gardening.

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I often knit while listening to the radio or watching TV. Even though I love reading, it's impossible to knit and read a book unless it's spiral-bound (which is never done to books except cookbooks these days), so I have to make my reading time and my knitting time separate. That makes me sad, because I always have tons of projects waiting to be done, so I tend to sacrifice reading time for more knitting time.

I keep meaning to start downloading audiobooks, but I tend to be picky about the people reading them.

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When I'm on the internet I'd much rather read an article than watch a video. I just can't stand the videos.

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I've found this to be a source of frustration my whole life. I read so much faster then anyone (except maybe the micro machines guy) can read anything aloud.

It's amazing when you think about it how many media sources feel the need to read things to you that are already in plain sight on a screen. So either I attempt to attend to both and get mixed up because I'm so much farther ahead reading, or I ignore the verbalization and tap my foot waiting for the next part to begin.

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This also makes watching movies with subtitles really annoying. I have a lot of friends with minor hearing problems so we tend to watch movies with subtitles on.

It's pretty handy for movies with a lot of audio dynamics as you don't have to have it super loud to hear the quiet parts, however often I miss a lot of the visual stuff because I'm busy reading, and I get information out of sync with the movie so I always feel vaguely like I've been given spoilers beforehand.

Also it's a little weird to always be laughing a couple of seconds before everyone else.

Edited at 2007-12-27 07:47 pm (UTC)

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I've found that problem as well, although we don't watch subtitled English movies very often.

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You can listen to NPR in the car, you can't read a book. I like to watch the network news, or, even better, Jim Lehrer, while I'm ironing. (Audiobooks only work for me in longish stretches, most of my car trips are under 15 minutes. When we go on a road trip, we always take audiobooks) I can knit socks while I watch the news.

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I've noticed that as well. Many times I intend to turn on NPR when I'm at home, but after 5 minutes I'm antsy and want to do something else. In the car, just enough of my attention is diverted to the road so that the radio or audiobooks are done just at the right pace for my attention to stay with them.

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I like this theory a lot because it dovetails with my personal experience. I'm not very good at splitting my attention span for input. Listening to NPR in the car doesn't work for me - I have to keep enough attention reserved for the road that I always feel like I'm missing something in the audio. There's a similar dynamic for video: a video stream that I'm seriously trying to extract information from will take up my whole attention span. So for either to work for me, I need that to be pretty much the only thing I'm doing - and then I notice that the information density is, on average, very low. On one side of the standard distribution, Fox News. On the other, TEDTalks.

I would much rather spend my info-absorbing time on high-density, high-quality information sources - and while density and quality aren't exactly correlated, they're not independent, either: good info sources tend to be dense. Hence, the Internet, where I actually have a reasonable chance at assembling a personal slate of them. Hyperlinking and tabbed browsing produce an information density that hard print, video, and audio are just totally incapable of right now.

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I'm a fast reader, and this theory makes a lot of sense to me.

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We're not the minority.

The corporate media rolls over for their masters, that's why the media is obsessed with kidnapped/preggers white chicks and spring break.

Welcome to corporate facism. Leave your brain at the door.

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Which I think is an inaccurate description of NPR, the specific example that Ferrett used, which despite its faults rarely seems to talk about "kidnapped white chicks" and "spring break."

To the Ferrett: My husband is extremely dyslexic. He's been working on a book for weeks now that I read in a day and a half. He can read newspapers but again, the small print and less-than-clear text make it difficult to do so. However, because he loves the news, he listens to NPR almost religiously. I am so thankful that there's a resource out there that allows him such easy access to world news.

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A few days ago my girlfriend and I drove out to her family xmas party, her brother was in the car with us, he's 17 years old.

He mentioned some book she had laying about in her car for one of her college classes, specifically talking about having read it and liking it etc.

He moments later proudly noted that this was a joke, because he had never read an entire book in his entire life, or at least not since early grade school. And this was something he said with a great triumphant flare.

fucking horrible world we're living in...

\/\/

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That's really sad. :(

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Good point! I've managed to see the other side without necessarily appreciating that.

People couldn't understand why I re-read books (as I do) until I put it like this:

"You have favourite films you watch time and again, right? It takes me about that long to re-read an averagely chunky book".

I think I'm about 1100 wpm, always have been (they didn't really believe it at school at first, until I did comprehension tests just fine...). Certainly 100-150 pages/hour, dependent on author style. Bit slower for tech stuff (usually). That and a good memory have stood me in good stead in life.

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Have you tried listening to the BBC World Service?

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You know, I've noticed that they speak really quickly on that show!

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I have to agree with this idea. I'm a really fast reader, and video/audio information tends to make me seriously impatient. Whereas J, a slow reader, loves audiobooks and NPR.

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I often feel frustrated by the proliferation of podcasts and vidblogs: I don't have time for that. I can read bits and pieces here and there, and construct a context, but auditory and visual information requires much more of my attention, and if it's split up, I have much more difficulty bringing the pieces together.

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Yeah, I've noticed that a lot of podcasts really need to get with the concepts of "script" and "editing" rather than just throwing out "an hour of extemporaneous yammering with my mates."

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To me, they are completely incomparable. I know they're each classified into the same genre, whether it be "news" or sci-fi, but language can't necessarily convey the same thing as a picture can and vice-versa.
For Example "Janet Jackson had a wardrobe malfunction at the 2004 Superbowl halftime show," simply doesn't convey the image http://flickr.com/photos/7861007@N04/552388331/ because "wardrobe malfunction" can mean a multitude of different things.
I really believe that different genres are better off in different mediums, which I'm sure everyone can agree on, the only issue is getting everyone to agree on which genre goes where.... For the previous example I would say that a picture is required, but I also think that you don't need a picture or video from the game o know whether or not the Yankees won Baseball game A. I know that my dad would quite certainly disagree with me on at least the baseball game because "it's not who won, but how it was won."

I don't think it's really about how much information you can get in x amount of time, but what information you're looking for in the first place that should be the deciding factor in what medium you choose.

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"Janet Jackson had a wardrobe malfunction at the 2004 Superbowl halftime show," simply doesn't convey the image...

Absolutely not. On the other hand, I think I could fit a little more text into the same space as the picture you pointed at without dropping below twelve-point type. Certainly, I could fit in enough to express the detail that a euphemism like "wardrobe malfunction" covers. Personally, I'd say something like...

Janet Jackson's right breast was exposed during the 2004 Superbowl halftime show. Justin Timberlake tore her a portion of Ms. Jackson's costume off during a dance routine. A metal ornament was covering Ms. Jackson's nipple, leading some observers to believe that the so-called "wardrobe malfunction" was in fact planned.

That doesn't cover the whole story, and it's not written to journalistic standards, but it's certainly better than either the photo or your proposed sentence.

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... any YouTube broadcasting you do had better be high on the informational dense-o-meter or you're going to get this journal entry quoted back at you. :)

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I can understand where you are coming from. I hate to watch news videos on the internet because they always feel like a waste of my time. First of all, I can read way faster than a newscaster can talk. Second, if the story isn't that interesting I can just skim to the good parts, that is a lot harder with a video. Third, news videos just seem like a waste of bandwidth to me. Why waste 10 megs on what you could tell me in less than 10k?

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And also take into account that the low information density of video is compounded by the way TV programs are made. I was watching a show the other day on Discovery Channel/History Channel/TLC/A&E/National Geographic (I honestly can't remember except that it was one of those) and by the end of it I was thoroughly disgusted because after every second commercial break, we had to recap the program up to that point (for people who were just coming in), with the end result that an hour program, minus commercials, mine recaps, probably actually amounted to something like 15 minutes of actual content. *grumble*

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Have you seen the video game reviews by Zero Punctuation? That's how information-dense I need a video to be to make it better than reading. Or maybe it's the subject matter - X-Play is one of the few TV shows I can pay attention to. ZeFrank was also pretty good.

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Agreed. It's agonizing to wait for the television to get finished telling me *their* story when I'm used to skimming through to the relevant parts as necessary. I tried watching the "Guns, Germs and Steel" videos (TV specials?) and I couldn't handle it - I'd much rather work through the hundreds of pages of text and get ALL the information, not just the "shiny" information, repeated over and over, and cutting away to video to keep people interested.

I've become a snob!

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