Content is More Important than Medium
August 18th, 2012
|
An argument I have made before is that content is more important than medium. Apparently not everyone agrees with this. I tend to think that giving kids laptops is not necessarily going to educate them, because they’ll probably just use them to look at silly web videos or play games. Similarly, even the “boob tube” can be enlightening, if it’s showing a world class university lecture or one of the greatest masterpieces of film of all time.
Television content is usually intended to draw a quick audience for a short period of time so that advertisements can be pushed. This leads to a huge amount of crap being broadcast. Books are excellent for holding scholarly information, and often do.
But this is just a general trend, not a hard and fast rule and it can, in fact, be entirely wrong. There is some excellent content in the form of moving images and there’s also a massive amount of crap in printed text.
Here’s a graphic I made to make this point…
Yes, I know it’s cherry-picking. I’ve pared some of the most critically acclaimed, informative and eye-opening television content with the most worthless literature I could find. The point is simply don’t judge a book by it’s cover, or for that matter, the fact that it’s a book, because it might still be crap.
This entry was posted on Saturday, August 18th, 2012 at 8:34 pm and is filed under Culture, Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
View blog reactions
August 19th, 2012 at 1:20 am
Okay, content, yes, is what matters. Those books all look completely horrible.
Medium does matter though because it shapes content. Television lends itself to sitting there and dolling while watching meaningless bs pumped out. Books less so. Reading is more mental exercise. Therefore, television, as a medium, is largely catering to a market of idiots and books are not. Also, the nature of the market means crappy books get weeded out.
Then again, it’s also something to do with the availability too. Writing a million crap books does not hurt the good ones, you still get those. TV is not the same. More crap on limited number of channels. Every **** show occupies the channel.
I guess that is changing now with youtube and everything, but it held true for a long time. If you put stupid crap on tv, it gets watched for lack of much else to watch.
There are probably millions of crappy books that were written and published. No matter because history just forgets them.
Quote Comment
August 19th, 2012 at 2:40 am
Billy said:
I think you’re missing the point here. This is a great meme BTW. Each medium has its own format which works well. Just because an educational TV program happens to be sprinkled with some commercial time or the viewer is easily succumbed to distraction by channel surfing or excessing viewing doesn’t mean that books are always better than video. Just because certain magazines like NatGeo are sprinkled with ads doesn’t make them crap either. They’re an apples and oranges comparison.
It’s true that DVR’s, Netflix, and youtube are making many of these programs available with either no or very little commercials. But books are not videos and videos are not books. There are bad books and bad videos. Bad videos often go to the waste bin of history as well.
Many people are visual learners and there is a whole new wave of visual lecture learning becoming increasingly popular. We see this with sites like the Kahn academy and coursera.org. Video when combined with database technology gives a new opportunity to collect data about how people learn, or what works well to explain something over other methods.
I would agree that videos cannot cover certain subjects to the depth and degree of a book in many instances, but the two mediums can compliment one another.
Quote Comment
August 19th, 2012 at 3:14 am
5000 whining atheists vs the Great Prophet
clubconspiracy.com/forum/showthread.php?p=81388
Quote Comment
August 19th, 2012 at 10:51 am
Unfortunately McLuhan was right: The medium is the message, more often than it should be. The slickness of the presentation, as well as the platform mitigate to signal the importance and the verity of the content.
Quote Comment
August 19th, 2012 at 11:15 am
Hey Doc,
Sorry to bug you about this, but something seems to be wrong with the article RSS feed. It’s telling me that it’s not valid (as of about a week ago). The last one that worked properly was “uncontacted tribes”
Quote Comment
August 19th, 2012 at 3:43 pm
Medium versus content question is more complex than it seems.
What is a book? if a book is anything that is printed pages, regardless of if it’s bound, then you must include supermarket gossip periodicals. Those are as unintellectual as the worst reality television. Sorry, I can’t see how anyone with half a brain cares what Kim Kardashian and her current fling are to or any of the other crap in those things.
What is television? An even more difficult question. I think when people say “television” they mean the shows that are broadcast on networks. This question would have been easier 30 years ago, when that’s all that was. Now you have web video and VOD and even VCR’s and DVD’s make it a difficult situation.
I do not think “television” in common speak is to mean “moving image content.” When people say “television” they do not generally refer to instructional videos on how to repair your car or to raw event footage.
If television is the technology of recording and transmitting images then nobody can deny it has enormous potential to expand and enlighten humanity. If the astronauts who walked on the moon came back with no film or video of it and just wrote of their experiences, it would surely be a good read, but not the same as seeing it. Human memory is pretty bad at keeping track of things and words only give you so much power of description. It’s better to have the unblinking eye of the video camera to document the event.
Like I said, though, in common context that’s not what we mean by “television”
Quote Comment
August 19th, 2012 at 11:28 pm
Matthew said:
It’s working fine for me.
What exactly is the address of the feed you are using? Is it the Feedburner feed or the local one? And what happens? Do the headlines show up but not link back properly?
Having trouble figuring out what is going on, as I can’t reproduce your problem.
Quote Comment
August 20th, 2012 at 2:58 am
The local one isn’t updating (but the comments one is).
I’m not getting any error messages at my end, just not seeing any new articles in it.
Quote Comment
August 20th, 2012 at 3:16 am
drbuzz0 said:
http://depletedcranium.com/feed/
Nothing shows up at all. No new messages, no notification of a new article – as far as it’s concerned, there isn’t anything new up.
Quote Comment
August 20th, 2012 at 4:13 pm
I would never expected ‘Connections’ to be on the list.
I remember watching the series when it was first aired and, even though I was but a child critical thinker (I say child as a just learning thing) and my awe was inspired.
Unfortunately, this side of the pond it has rarely been repeated and quietly forgotten.
Quote Comment
August 20th, 2012 at 4:40 pm
Brilliant!
But sadly unless the medium is used the content is wasted. So ensuring good content is actualy “picked up” and made use of still requires a medium that allows or encourages people to use it.
Quote Comment
August 20th, 2012 at 5:45 pm
Matthew said:
Still working for me. What reader are you using?
Maybe you could try deleting the subscription from your subscribed feeds and then adding it again?
Quote Comment
August 20th, 2012 at 6:31 pm
drbuzz0 said:
I’m running Seamonkey, using the RSS reader in its mail/newsgroups module. It works with all of my other feeds just fine, so this is a bit odd.
I may try deleting/recreating, I’ll need to figure out how to save the posts (I’m archiving the articles)
Quote Comment
August 21st, 2012 at 12:31 am
Considering great television, I would not have thought of Alfred Hitch**** Presents off the top of my head, but it fits. Excellent performances and really well written and directed. BTW, not all episodes were directed by Hitch****, but he presented them and they all had great actors and great direction.
Hitch**** was a pioneer to accept television, because at the time movie directors were trying to downplay it and would not touch tv. He was great though. It’s still some of the most clever dark drama performances out there I think.
Quote Comment
August 21st, 2012 at 7:01 am
It’s easy to be overly nostalgic and say that the old shows are better than the new ones, and in fact, from the beginning there was crap on television, but still I do think that some of the early writers were so much more clever, interesting and funny than today.
There are a few old gems of sitcoms that are very well written and acted and you just can’t argue with. The Dick Van Dyke show was one of my favorites. They made it edgy, funny, ironic and surprising without resorting to bathroom humor or dirty jokes. Not that I am a prude about that kind of thing, but it is just cheap laughs and it takes a lot of real talent and creativity to do so well without the cheap shock value.
Quote Comment
August 21st, 2012 at 7:07 am
Isn’t the proliferation of channels (thanks to cable, satellite and digital TV) one reason for the decline in the quality of TV programming, because there are now far more channels chasing roughly the same “pot” of advertising revenue?
Quote Comment
August 21st, 2012 at 7:59 am
I turned off the History Channel years ago when they aired a show about ghost ships. I cancelled cable altogether not long after.
Quote Comment
August 21st, 2012 at 10:17 am
George Carty said:
I don’t know about that. Perhaps. I would think that if you had a lot more channels, you’d have a lot more content, most of it being crap, but a portion being good. For example, if only 1% were any good, but you have 500 channels, that would mean at any time about 5 channels of “good” content exist.
Sadly this is not the case.
I also don’t know that things have gotten much worse in recent years versus what they were in years past. I mean, most television in the 80’s was crap. It might have gotten worse. That’s a little bit subjective.
There are a number of factors, I think. It’s partially driven by short-term returns. Shock and tabloid television gets quick views and is easy to produce.
Shafe said:
Ghost ships? I take it you do not mean the genuinely interesting and mysterious cases of ship disappearances and of abandoned ships like the Mary Celeste? Because those are actually some very strange and fascinating historical events. Back before they had wireless on the high seas, some things happened which we have only the most limited evidence of. Ships never making it to port and scant debris being found etc.
The History Channel was launched in mid 1990s, as an extension of A&E (which at the time was a semi-highbrow channel of fairly good quality). It started out running mostly run-of-the-mill documentaries. Pretty good stuff, in general.
It’s just gotten dumber and dumber. Very very rarely is there anything on History worth watching. Sometimes an okay World War II documentary. They do love Hitler content.
Their main series shows are just… horrible.
Modern Marvels, I kinda don’t blame them as much for the decline in that once-okay show so much as it is the fact that they seem to be running out of marvelous things. Eventually, they finished doing shows about suspension bridges, aircraft carriers, canals etc and started doing “bathroom technology” and that kind of thing. Once in a while, you get an okay segment. There was one on radiation detection devices a couple years ago that was good, because you rarely get any kind of mainstream coverage of that.
It also seems that show has just become more of a joke and does not try to be informative.
Then you have stuff like Pawn Stars. Okay, I can get how that is interesting, to some extent. Seeing the kind of weird historic items brought in for sale and how a pawn shop operates? Yeah, I could take an hour of that once in a while. … but not 8 hours a day, and especially not when they turn it into a semi-scripted reality show focusing on turning the staff into one-dimensional characters.
Then Ancient Aliens and Nostradamus stuff……. UGGGGG!
Shafe said:
Yeah. I’ve thought about that.
Sadly, I’m not in a great situation for that. The DSL in my area is only so-so and the cable company, despite being expensive, does have excellent throughput on their internet service.
Actually, it’s sometimes a tough choice to make with regards to what to do with cable: to get internet you need to have cable service. Getting the basic digital package is pretty much the same cost. So you end up with some cable television to get the internet.
The problem is they stations that are only crap.
If you want to get anything even semi-worthwhile, you pay a lot more. There’s some stuff worth seeing on AMC, TCM, History 2 (rarely and less than it used to be), Science, National Geographic (also on the way down), the BBC and some others. But you pay through the nose for that. Paying the extra money gets you hundreds of additional channels, but only a handful worthwhile.
Then there’s certainly good content on HBO, but again, for more money.
I had the premium package. I canceled because even if there is okay content, I have no time to watch TV these days. If there is a show that looks really good and I really want to see, it’s almost always posted online pretty fast. Someone usually posts segments on youtube. The quality is not always great, but it’s ok.
Quote Comment
August 21st, 2012 at 11:42 am
drbuzz0 said:
It’s possible that it was a deeply fascinating and revealing show, but I didn’t wait to find out. The overly dramatic style of the narration and video sequences were the familiar calling cards of countless other “unexplained phenomena” shows that did too little to present rational explanations and gave too much credence to paranormal theories.
It made me miss the days when we called it the “Hitler Channel.” 24 hours of WWII documentaries may have been repetitive, but at least it was factual history.
drbuzz0 said:
I’ll count myself fortunate. We’ve got the phone company’s fiber-optic service, and 3Mbps internet is about $30/mo. That’s good enough for streaming online content, and a $9 Netflix subscription (along with free Hulu, YouTube, and other sites) gets me access to lots of television content including tons of documentaries. I generally never see a new TV series until it’s been out for several seasons and has garnered good recommendations. Then I watch them either ad-free or with limited ads without waiting for new episodes each week. And it’s a god-send to let my kids watch high-quality cartoons on demand without getting them amped up by Barbie and cereal ads.
News services have streaming content, too, but I prefer reading the web-versions of the newspapers. That way I can get straight to the content that interests me without sitting through interminable bouts of feigned outrage over some politico’s views on abortion.
I don’t know about your area, but in mine you can get the cable company’s internet service without their television service ($40/mo for 3Mbps). It’s not as cheap as the phone company’s, but it’s a lot cheaper than paying for 300 channels just to get NatGeo.
Quote Comment
August 21st, 2012 at 2:46 pm
Shafe said:
Yeah, I should look into their lower price plans. I think you have to have television, because they can’t block the unencrypted television channels from coming through the line. I got some additional channels and the box because I wanted to get the fastest internet possible. It’s like 20 Mbps continuous downstream with 50 Mbps burst. In practice I can get a sustained 16 Mbps.
Then I fell into the “might as well” trap. “Well if I’m paying 60 dollars a month, I might as well pay four more for the DVR. I might as well pay five more for the additional channels.”
Part of me felt like I kinda needed the bad channels too. I had this fear that I might miss something idiotic. I blog about idiotic things. I need to keep up on the latest stupid.
Quote Comment
August 21st, 2012 at 10:53 pm
how could you have left off bill nye and beckman?
Quote Comment
August 22nd, 2012 at 3:22 am
Each medium has it’s own strengths and weaknesses – which make them good or bad for specific roles.
Video as a whole is very good for teaching, you can show processes with the passage of time, animated graphics, expression, movement, whatever you need.
These things also make video a good way of telling a simple story, which can be very powerful emotionally and visually striking.
Books inherently imply something more solid, more in-depth.
They can be “linear” as in most novels where you start and you work your way through a story, with a lot more opportunities to detail the intricacies and thought processes which video doesn’t easily convey.
But they can also be references, much like a dictionary. No-one tries to read a dictionary from start to end, and no-one would want a dictionary on videotape.
Content remains more important than medium, but the medium does dictate what type of content can be conveyed and how effectively.
Quote Comment
September 4th, 2012 at 1:30 am
There’s a very good one on History Channel called Evolve that is one of the best programmes about evolution I’ve seen. National Geographic also had a really good programme called Air Crash Investigation which is also really informative and exciting in a morbid kind of way.
While it’s easy to mock a lot of reality programming, because most of it is rubbish of course, I think there is value in some of them. This week Pick TV did a run of a series called Inside Gatwick, a fly-on-the-wall doco about Gatwick Airport during a period of change in recent years plus the Great White-out of 2010.
Quote Comment
September 10th, 2012 at 2:48 am
Peebs said:
Not to mention, The Day the Universe Changed, which was great but hard to find now.
Quote Comment
September 10th, 2012 at 11:03 pm
So thinking about this today I decided to look up the old “Our Friend The Atom” Disney program to see how it held up.
First link I find…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByZ1AyDEGSk
…has links to nuttery about atoms aren’t real and comments are all about how it’s propaganda piece made at the behest of Eisenhower.
You know there are days I roll out of bed, look around and don’t even want to keep trying.
Quote Comment