I used to really like youtube for all the interesting content - especially tutorial videos of all kind. Lately I have become very tired of watching moving images for content that could be delivered in text form - where I can choose to read and take it in at my own pace, in silence.
I agree that not all content can be delivered in this way, videos are incredibly helpful with a lot of stuff, but I wish more stuff could be (also) readable instead of watchable, or even listenable. Is in part an autism/accessibility thing, but also plays into my thoughts about the appropriateness of resource use for information recording/presentation/transfer from an Solarpunk computing perspective.
What do you think?
Back when I forced myself through the first half of an EE bachelor with a lots of heavy maths and physics and computing I relied on youtube videos almost completely - whenever one of my profs couldn’t deliver stuff in a way I could understand it (or when my autistic ears couldn’t cope with the room acoustics plus their voice) I skipped class and went to youtube for help. I could not have done it with books, honestly. I needed both a human of my preference plus some well made graphics and diagrams - and then I could make sense of the concepts in the book and memorize them. Found a treasure of wonderful lecture series that had mediocre me surfing smoothly through my course before Covid put an end to it. So I guess for complex stuff videos can be great, but I’m picky and want my preferred level of information density.
These days I look up quite a range of different things: computer stuff, plants, gardening and animal stuff. Especially for the outdoor stuff there is an enormity of content online that is either in video form - so personality is quite a thing there, but I really just would like to know if I can feed plant A to animal B, or when I should seed my herbs - information that a tech person could put quickly in a table, but which some people on youtube can spin up to a 10 min video. For the computer stuff, videos can be helpful and to the point, but I would still prefer a text with images.
But yeah, it’s a little frustrating to know that the content I seek is in there somewhere, somewhere in a video between walls of spoken text I cannot search in.