YouTube has already replaced Yahoo and will shortly overtake Google as the primary Web search destination among children and teenagers. Its repository of videos - hitherto mere entertainment - is now beginning to also serve as a reference library and a news source. This development seals the fate of text. It is being dethroned as the main vehicle for the delivery of information, insight, and opinion.
This is only the latest manifestation in a plague of intellectual turpitude that is threatening to undermine not only the foundations of our civilization, but also our survival as a species. People have forgotten how to calculate because they now use calculators; they don't bother to memorize facts or poetry because it is all available online; they read less, much less, because they are inundated with sounds and sights, precious few of which convey any useful information or foster personal development.
A picture is worth 1000 words. But, words have succeeded pictograms and ideograms and hieroglyphs for good reasons. The need to combine the symbols of the alphabet so as to render intelligible and communicable one's inner states of mind is conducive to abstract thought. It is also economical; imposes mental discipline; develops the imagination; engenders synoptic thinking; and preserves the idiosyncrasies and the uniqueness of both the author and its cultural-social milieu. Visual are a poor substitute as far as these functions go.
In a YouTube world, literacy will have vanished and with it knowledge. Visuals and graphics can convey information, but they rarely proffer organizing principles and theories. They are explicit and thus shallow and provide no true insight. They demand little of the passive viewer and, therefore, are anti-intellectual. In this last characteristic, they are true to the Internet and its anti-elitist, anti-expert, mob-wisdom-driven spirit. Visuals encourage us to outsource our "a-ha" moments and the formation of our worldview and to entrust them to the editorial predilections of faceless crowds of often ignorant strangers.
Moreover, the sheer quantity of material out there makes it impossible to tell apart true and false and to distinguish between trash and quality. Inundated by "user-generated-content" and disoriented, future generations will lose their ability to discriminate. YouTube is only the logical culmination of processes started by the Web. The end result will be an entropy of information, with bits isotropically distributed across vast farms of servers and consumed by intellectual zombies who can't tell the difference and don't care to.
Also Read:
The Six Sins of the Wikipedia
Is Education a Public Good?
The Idea of Reference
The Future of the Book
The Kidnapping of Content
The Internet and the Library
The Future of Online Reference
Will Content Ever be Profitable?
The Disintermediation of Content
The Future of Electronic Publishing
Free Online Scholarship - Interview with Peter Suber
You have said so much in the above article,and I agree with you wholeheartedly:Visual learning has definitely supplanted the written word,and as a result,epiphanies(those ah hahs)have not only become an outsourced commodity,I don't believe they occur anymore for those who rely solely upon visual aids.
Books,the reading of which,allow the mind to think,ponder,as well as absorb(good or bad)what is on the page.
So much is lost when we merely allow a picture or image to be the main source of information.
Many years ago, you may remember,Ray Bradbury wrote a compelling book:Fahrenheit 451,in which all books were burned.
Are we headed,you think,for that place in the real world where books are not necessarily burned,but no longer used ,which in a real sense is synonomous to their being burned?