No Stupid Questions

When I read books, picturing everything in my head is a part of the enjoyment. Often, books describe senses and feelings that would be more difficult to portray in images or video. Some examples:

Right now, I am reading Ancillary Justice (by Ann Leckie), and the main character (who is the narrator) has difficulty with recognizing gender, so, unless explicitly stated, it is up to me to decide how characters look. Also, main character controls multiple bodies at once, and some paragraphs are full of parallel events and thoughts.

Annihilation (by Jeff Vandermeer) has a movie adaptation, but it's different from the book. The book goes deeper into the main characters own thoughts, concerns and regrets. It also describes smells and physical senses quite often, and the creature the main character encounters evokes emotions more so than just a description. And throughout the story, in addition to the general eeriness of Area X, there is just a feeling of being lost. (I should give credit that It Follows does the uneasy feeling really well, too)

And just to be annoying, I can extrapolate your logic to "video does not show what happens around the camera, VR is better", and "VR does not bring the senses of touch, smell, and heat, fully immersive simulators are better" :)

No.

It really depends for what and who's watching. I'll prefer reading instructions to watching a video a hundred times, but I'll prefer a video over a text for entertainment more frequently though.

Not universally, no.

People absorb different things in different ways.

Where filmed media excels is cutting the description into pieces and showing it on screen. That doesn't necessarily make it easier to understand for everyone, and certainly not for every book that get turned into a show or movie.

For folks that have issues with picturing things in their head (aphantasia or disphantasia), movies are going to be a major boost in understanding. For folks that don't have that issue, it comes down more to preference.

I can't say either is better, or even easier to understand, in and of itself. I actually run towards hyperphantasia; I can read a book and once I sink in, it's as vivid as it gets. Sometimes, it's a movie in my head and the words on the page are just there in the background (and that's despite dyslexia, if only a fairly minor expression of it).

There's book versions of movies as well, with the most interesting example being the E.T. novelization from way back when. The book changed things that were in the movie, to the extent that it was very noticeable. But both the movie and book had their own merits in terms of understanding the story. One example is the scenes with the plastic barriers and such while ET is being examined by the government. A deeper sense of dread and horror was possible in the book via descriptions. But the movie conveyed the claustrophobic, invasive feeling of it better because you could see all the alienness of what the government was doing, how all the lights and airlocks and such became more apart from the family than the family was from ET.

But, if the author fucks up the descriptions, no picture in the mind will come close to what film can do. So there's a lot more craft needed in writing visuals than there are in most video footage. The barrier between understandable images on screen and conveying information is lower. Conversely, film has to work harder to convey emotion via craft; you can just say that a character is scared in a book and get the basic idea down.

So it isn't cut and dried. There's a lot of factors between the mind of the creator/ and the audience's minds that make it complicated

You need to engage your imagination to convert words to a picture /scene in your head.

I don't know about other people but when I read a story, if it is well written I see it as a movie playing in my mind.

Same when I get ideas for stories, I see it like a movie playing in my head but from what I understand, everyone is different in that respect.

No.

Most people have no idea how to present information, this on top of the average person being able to read about 4x faster than someone can speak. I regularly play podcasts at 1.5x-2x. There are perhaps 3 people who I'll watch on YouTube for information, only because they show how something works and the video format is useful for the subject, and I still often play it at 2x, or just skip through all the nonsense.

99% of video presentations are garbage to me.

As for entertainment, books and video are different things. Video will always have the influence of scriptwriters, director, producers, actors. You're watching their interpretation of a story. Sometimes this can even be a good thing when they highlight something you may not have really noticed. Often though, it comes with the baggage of someone fundamentally altering a story.

Do you maybe suffer from Aphantasia?

Not everyone can picture things in their mind. It doesn't have to be complete.

I feel I have a better understanding of written words than film. All my education taught was how to recognize things in literature; not any kind of visual medium. If a director of a movie uses a subtle visual element as a metaphor, I am probably not going to recognize it as such, compared to a similar metaphor used in a book, through text.

I can read much faster than any video can deliver information to me. Pacing isn't as much of a problem.

Not for me. The written word is much more vivid and conveys information much more efficiently than video. Other people process things differently, I know, but that's how it is for me.

For the most part, yes. By design. Conveying something in a movie is more challenging in that it has less time to do it than a book has less time to do it. So it HAS to be, to some degree, more blunt and on-the-nose than a book can take its time being.

You can write five pages of internal description discussing what your main character thinks about the world around them. But you can't show that in a movie and so you have to figure out how to get the gist of it across in a few lines of dialogue and some emoting.

It's why show don't tell is a rule. You have to simplify a movie in comparison to a book or else your audience will be sitting through a ten hour film.

It depends? Video can get across an explicit concept easier for me. If I'm learning something that I'll struggle with, I find that video is usually a better bet for me.

For fiction, I prefer books because it can get a lot more across. It's not even just that they cut corners or parts of a book, sometimes a book will have the protagonist basically run an internal monologue, or just notice something in a particular way that conveys a lot of information in a way that a movie or show can't really do as seamlessly, if at all.

Video is better for showing details and small things, but I can fill in the blanks myself- I find it really frustrating when authors don't let me fill in the blanks. I don't need the entire feast described in depth to me, I don't give a shit how the pig is coated in honey and the desserts look delicious unless the reveal is that the pig is poisoned and the desserts went bad last week.

At 24 frames per second, a million pictures (frames) is 11 hours 34 minutes 26.667 seconds

Anyway, as to your question, this will vary from person to person.

It strongly depends on the book but in general a book will focus on just giving you enough of a description that matters for the story. Some will describe a wall by just saying, "there was a wall". Others will describe the features of the wall that may be relevant to the story, "it was made of brick that you could tell was repaired often due to the changes in color". Some books describe a wall with a whole history of where the bricks came from, how they were made with the ground up bones of local pets, and the fact that its curvy playful design was meant to invoke joy in order to hide the evil origin. In a movie, such a wall would only look a certain way based on how the designer wanted it to look, but you don't get the additional context unless they have the actors specifically say something about it (which usually comes off unnatural). In a book, only the things the author describes actually matter, and the rest can be up to you. What is a curvy playful wall? One that wiggles back and forth? One that has circular holes in it? Is it colorful? In full honesty, in this example none of that matters because as long as you imagine something "curvy" and "playful" then any wall will work.

When talking about historical information or documentation, you are absolutely right. Lots of words are needed to describe what one photo will give, and lots of photos are needed to show what one video will give. I argue we are at the point where VR models should be considered for documentation since a video can capture everything so long as you look at it at every angle, but what about with different lighting? Why stop there? What about X-ray videos as well? In the end it goes back to how much is needed to share the important information. Is it a wall, or 3 terabytes of digital information with full spectral 3D imaging?

I can watch and enjoy a nature documentary full of facts like species names and places, but none of it sticks.

Reading is much better for retaining facts, even better if there is a quiz.

However a video demonstrating how to do something is great.

Videos can be misleading, unhelpful, and fail to paint the whole picture. Look no further than the society we live in today, where loads of fake videos get pumped out and then we need written articles to explain all the things wrong with the video.

Obviously fake info can be written down too, but we have a much bigger problem with fake videos. TikTok is the modern equivalent of a newspaper. Newspapers have laws about what they're allow to print. At least half the stuff on TikTok is engagement bait, ads, political ads, etc.

In which era were people better informed? Print era or video era?