Writing != Reading and as someone building an app powered by dictation that turns speech into text for the reader to consume... speaking is fast, reliable and powerful and reading is fast, reliable and powerful.
On the other hand typing (especially on mobile, but even on desktop) doesn't share these qualities nearly as much in the general populace, even if some of us are good at it -- and hand-writing is even worse (although it's arguably a more powerful communication method).
Listening is also pretty bad and you can see for example Matter's recent release of podcast transcription as a great example of making things easy to consume and easy to produce.
In the limited number of attempts I've tried with audio journaling, it always comes across as stream-of-consciousness. I like to think out loud already, so I end up removing my anchor -- the written document -- and just chase one thought after another after another. I don't see how I'd be able to maintain the quality of my journal (or other written works) if I didn't have my easily re-referenced existing document.
Have you had success with audio/video journals? Any tips?
As other commenters have said, it ends up more like a stream of consciousness and not something well thought out. My word choice isn’t as good. The prose just kind of sucks. I don’t learn much about myself from these sorts of entries.
This is something I’ve simply accepted will happen because I do this on days that I don’t have time to sit in front of a keyboard for 30m. Maybe having more well defined prompts would help improve the quality of these entries. I’m not sure.
On the other hand, pencils and notebooks were affordable. Once you knew writing, paper journal was most obvious than self video. If you wanted to make the journal available to public, blog was a thing (like vlog is today.) However, on heavy adoption, not everybody use to log…
Also note that as handwriting decrease while typewriting increase, written journal become digital.
recording yourself with a device such as a camera or microphone, the device is taking your thoughts and putting them inside of itself. implicitly, you are more vulnerable.
but times change, and with them so does access to the necessary technology. you haven’t yet reached the terminus. enjoy the ride.
So maybe writing is terrible if both actors are in bad faith and no one bothers trying to understand or steel man.
May as well read or watch a video. Same focus required either way.
Though I do think I’m unusual. Basically can’t enjoy podcasts the way most people do, which is a bummer.
In hindsight, the high school calculus teacher who forced us to take notes while they lectured, and got upset if you stopped, was not setting me up for success. I’d get to the end with a bunch of notes but having understood nothing I heard, because I was too busy transcribing to actually listen. I knew she was messing me up at the time and what I needed to be able to do to succeed, but it took me years to realize it’s a general problem I have. Can’t take information in unless my attention is undivided.
I would much rather read than listen.
> I can't bring myself to understand the importance for such things (if it even exists.) Communication is about the exchange of information, not superfluous nonsense that contains hardly any relevance to it.
When someone tries to communicate in writing something which is better handled by speaking, it's tedious and slow.
When someone tries to communicate by speaking something which is better handled by writing, it's tedious and slow.
A lot of Youtube videos and podcasts fall into the latter category, so like the author, I find myself getting annoyed about it a lot these days. Rather than spend 10 minutes watching the video, I prefer to spend 30 seconds reading the closed caption transcript.
However, this doesn't mean the former category doesn't exist.
That sentence is the key to the whole article. Koshka doesn't understand that multiple, simultaneous channels of information give richer information than the strict meaning of the text.
If you don't believe that information is conveyed through body language, facial expressions, and eye contact, then try watching a movie in a language that you don't understand, without subtitles.
My wife and I went to Germany once and my wife, being in TV/movies/theater, took me to some German theater... which was obviously all in German... which she speaks, and I don't. Thanks love /s
Anyway, although I couldn't understand what was being _said_, I could understand what was being _shown_ to me _visually_. I got the idea of each scene: that guy is a gangster and has a blood feud with that guy, who is chasing that chick's heart, and also is on the run from the cops, and so on.
Without the language, I understood easily 70-80% of what was going on.
Or the person using his or her own real name makes a living as a pundit and does not to have to worry about negative consequences. A lot of people on twitter and substack make a living and use real names and this does not preclude them from having original and or controversial ideas.
It does not require creative genius to imagine scenarios that disprove the claims (like the one you cited here) they have so thoughtlessly asserted. It does, however, require them to put some real effort toward aligning their beliefs with observable reality.
Writing and speaking have their places. It depends on context and the situation, really.
If I'm in a room with someone, and I say, "I dislike the work you've done", but it's delivered with a sarcastic tone, with a smile on my face, and a flowery movement of the arm to denote that I was joking, ideally the whole statement will be taken as a joke.
However...
If I'm in a room with someone, and I email them to say, "I dislike the work you've done", then everything else mentioned above is lost. How is this perceived by the other person? I, as the author of the statement, have to do extra work to portray meaning which can _still_ get lost:
"I dislike the work you've done! ... lol j/k ;-)"
That's not superior in this simple example, so I doubt it's going to be superior in more complex examples.
So I would ask the author this: why do we attend courts to solve complex legal matters? Why not do it entirely in writing? Would that not allow the highly educated, skilled labour that supports the legal system to "scale" better? Could a judge now not handle many cases at once versus having their time pinned to a physical location in which one case can be heard at a time?
It usually goes something like this.
"I am A Very Smart Person. I do not understand the point of Thing X. Therefore, Thing X must be useless and anyone that cares about Thing X must be an imbecile."
The core issue here is that the only thing this kind of argument does is portray the person making the argument as incapable of even conceiving the idea that there can be other points of view and other ways of interacting with the world than their own. In this case, to the point that after making a fully subjective argument, the author claims that their point is "objective" seemingly due to lack of self-awareness.
I am aware that the author is autistic and that autism usually comes with a certain difficulty when it comes to putting oneself into other peoples' shoes and a certain lack of self-awareness, but the self-aggrandizing tone of this little essay is simply very tiring.
I am extremely introverted, I struggle to identify facial expressions, I am highly adept at reading, and I'm also a bit hard of hearing (what I think may be a verbal processing disorder in my brain, because I have had several hearing tests and they have not been able to find anything wrong). You would think this means that I agree with the author of this article.
Yet I find verbal communication still very valuable when it is paired with facial expressions and body communication (especially hand gestures). Some concepts are extremely difficult to get across without these additional elements.
There have been many times that I've read extensively about a topic and struggled to imagine what they are describing, then watched a YouTube video of someone simply standing in front of a camera and describing the topic, and only then does it finally click for me. It goes the other way, too, of course (hearing it first without understanding and then reading it to have to click), but it suggests to me that both are valuable for understanding.
If I had to choose only one, I would choose reading. However, being limited to only reading would reduce my ability to learn about complex topics.
Some % of communication is non-verbal. Tone, expression, gesture. If the author of this article struggles with direct communication, it's likely because they don't (or can't) pay the necessary attention to these. So, for them text may be preferable. But most people aren't raw information processors.
I'm sure that's why emojis have become so widely embraced - it's easier to indicate tone with a picture than with text.
And then write it down, and summarize it in a tree structure. So I can simply link to the final result instead of talking and repeating everything
But that doesn't scale. Even if you have the best ideas, you won't get very far coordinating others if you can't communicate non-interactively.
- a person on IRC/slack/the comment section of a pull request
- that same person on a voice connection.
and see which one leads to incoherent rage faster.
But the nice thing is that a journal can be either or both, often at the same time. I think the most important thing about writing a daily journal is that the act of writing things down itself is a way of processing the thoughts and attempting to make sense of them.
I'm talk to myself too much to even attempt an audio or video journal. Speech to text certainly has it's usefulness, but I can't help thinking that video journaling borders more on performance than capturing/expanding/exploring ideas and thoughts. I'm sure there's lots of filmmakers and documentarians who'll disagree with me on that, though.
I used to take audio notes in the car, because it’s easy to do. But I never went back and listened. Maybe if it could be transcribed reasonably well it would work out. Some dictate to their phones quite a bit these days.
That being said, some easy/mindless tasks (such as doodling in this example) can actually improve focus, which might be mistaken for multitasking: https://university-relations.umn.edu/blog/2021/07/16/doodlin...
I can imagine that background noise, like a podcast, might not hinder some people's focus; it may even improve it. However, if they are not focusing closely on both the podcast AND on the other task they are performing, I would not call that multitasking. For example, I listen to the radio when I drive long distances because it stops me from feeling bored or fatigued, but I don't consider it multitasking because the driving itself is mindless in this scenario. As soon as I need to focus more actively on driving, I stop paying attention to the radio.
I would be curious to know if Fenyman experienced an internal monologue while he was thinking. I do not (my internal verbalizing is basically limited to recalling information that I've memorized rote), and I've often wondered if this is why I am adept at reading without verbalizing.