I’m by no means a weak reader, I love reading and do so often. I just find myself re-reading complex sections to ensure that I understand 100%.
I also like to be able to read something and then follow it on a train of thought. For example, if a post/article says that X causes Y because of Z I want to find out why Z causes it. What causes Z to be etc.
With a video I find this sort of learning to be inefficient and less effective while also making the whole experience a bit rigid. I also find that videos tend to leave out less glamorous details as they don’t video well if that makes sense
I think your dislike of video over text is because you're a quick learner. Like you said, going on a tangent and researching some word or sentence or statement makes you a thorough learner I think. Eventually you have a quicker and bigger grasp of the subject at hand, which is the whole point if you ask me.
I do agree with the thorough learner aspect. I think having come from physical engineering backgrounds helps a lot with that.
When studying aerospace, for example, there was a lot of ‘but why’ which usually ended up leading to ‘natural phenomenon’ after abstracting far enough.
Gen Z just sends you a picture of your door. (Mobile broadband)
What we perceive as the best way is often just driven by the technology available when we learned how to operate in the world.
Another example of advertising destroying the world.
Why? Attention span. If someone is reading to me, I tend to get 'pushed along' and it makes it easy to slog through a non fiction book that really could have been a pamphlet but the author needed it to be 400 pages. If I space out listening, it's usually not a problem because most non fic books are so repetitive. I suspect that's the secret behind video's popularity, people's attention is in short supply.
Just see how hard it is to read more than a few paragraphs when tired before bed vs. how hard it is to watch something in the same state.
I think this gets added to the point you are making about reading skills declining.
I don’t think it has anything to do with reading speed. When taking in complex technical information, you spend more time thinking and trying to understand than actually reading.
If you’re finding that you can quickly race through content, it probably just means you find the content easy to understand because you’re already familiar with many concepts.
IMO you don’t need any. The correctness of your conclusion is self-evident. Proof by common sense, QED.
Me either, but I have a hunch about why.
Are you a fast reader?
I am, at least compared to the population at large. And one of the reasons I can't stand video as a format for learning about coding topics is that it is so frustratingly slow compared to my reading speed. To get anywhere close, I have to crank the playback speed up so high that I start having trouble understanding what the presenter is saying. That's on top of other things like poor searchability and no way to copy-paste code snippets.
The decline of reading skills, at least in the US, is pretty well-documented. And my hunch is that for the increasingly large number of people coming into the industry who don't read quickly or well, the efficiency of learning from videos is closer to parity with text. What's more, I suspect there's high correlation between lower reading skills and dislike of the act of reading, so videos are a way to avoid having to do something unpleasant.
I have no solid evidence to back any of this up, but it seems at least as plausible to me as any other explanations I've run across.