From an article from The Onion (via ALDaily):
WASHINGTON—Unable to rest their eyes on a colorful photograph or boldface heading that could be easily skimmed and forgotten about, Americans collectively recoiled Monday when confronted with a solid block of uninterrupted text.
Dumbfounded citizens from Maine to California gazed helplessly at the frightening chunk of print, unsure of what to do next. Without an illustration, chart, or embedded YouTube video to ease them in, millions were frozen in place, terrified by the sight of one long, unbroken string of English words.
Was this written by some girl fresh out of her cultural studies BA? It’s smug in its point, and it’s smug in its dumb fucking sarcasm. Most satire is so embarrassingly contrived in its trite formula of: take some perceived cultural conflagration, invert and exaggerate it, then bask in the self-conscious daisy-chain of chuckles.
Obviously the hackneyed point is, people don’t read as much because they’re distracted by mediums which degrade the intellect due to their not being black and white text.
Someone please show me the study demonstrating that hearing words spoken with accompanying images, replete with bold attention-grabbing introductions, is a less effective way of learning than reading black and white text.
The truth is (and I’m not the first to make this point) that we can now consume more information than previous generations due to more efficient mediums of communication. If people want to study something in depth by reference to dense books, they still can and still DO; I’ve heard nothing about university enrollment rates dropping. But the rest of the time we can inform ourselves about anything we want in unprecedentedly easy, efficient and fun ways. I have knowledge in varying degrees of depth about subjects I would never have known to exist had I not grown up in the 21st century.
