Just try to use words to describe either of these photos and see how they fall short:

https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2015-10/19/1...

https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2015-10/19/1...

Between recorded voice and written text, I personally prefer written language. I like the ability to consume at my own pace, go back and re-read tricky bits, and easily search or quote. Plus it's much easier to use TTS to convert text to speech than the other way around (at the moment). Maybe someday technology will remove this boundary but currently that's my stance.

Take using a computer to type a word versus draw a picture: Effectively everyone who uses a computer can type a word, but I'd bet less than 10% could draw a circle.

But put a piece of paper in front of someone and effectively everyone can draw a circle.

This points to there being a limitation in the technology for working with other forms of media, not the effectiveness of the communication medium itself.

This isn't to say that text isn't also a better communication medium, but it is to say, until the technology has improved for communicating with other media, it's difficult to compare without basing the decision on the limitations of the technology.

In other words, most of the perceived advantages of text are really advantages of text being easier to represent digitally (or generally reproduced, e.g., printing press), not advantages of text as a communication medium itself.

On the other hand, many (technical/mathematical) concepts are more effectively explained using diagrams/images.

E.g. the very visual approach taken in Mathologer videos [1] makes difficult, esoteric, mathematical ideas accessible to a wider audience.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJ8pnCO0nTY

The oldest and easiest is the visual in 3D, then comes the visual in 2D.

Those exist since we have eyes.

Our brain have dedicated and sizeable infrastructure for that. Children can communicate in 3D (gestures, posture, expressions, objects) and in 2D drawings before learning textural communication with great effort.

Text is more regular and reliable in certain contexts (not always, sometimes a pictogram or others are better), when the circumstances are proper for that.

Text has its uses, just like all the other forms, not being paramount, not at all!

(I'd also argue about that we could read old texts. Sometimes yes, but sometimes we cannot read present ones neither if the cultural and knowledge background is inadequate. Which is just aggravated by the ages)

Text is efficient at transmitting data. If I want to describe a concept or an event, text is king.

However, media is more efficient at transmitting sentiment. It will take you far more than 4000 bytes of text to transmit the feeling or emotion an icon can convey, when used well. This is why we've (as a species) started using emojis, and why media leans to emotion and sentiment while text leans to data.

This is an exaggeration, life is almost always a grey area - but I hope you get my point.

Another example if we compare logographic language systems (e.g. Chinese characters, hieroglyphs ...) to alphabetic systems. I guess we can say both are text, but logographic systems are close to pictures as well (pictographic systems even more so) and they can convey information in much less characters, at the cost that one needs to know a much larger "alphabet".

Similarly if the information we are trying to transmit is actually an image, transmitting the actual image is certainly much less information than transmitting a description of the image. That is also why the comparison with the bird and twitter image falls flat. The image conveys a specific image, not the generic image of a bird. To describe that specific would need many more characters than 4. Similarly if I have a large set of numbers, it's much more efficient to store and transmit in binary format not as text.

Imagine saying “always bet on punch cards”. Look at any whiteboard in any company or school. It’s filled with text and diagrams. Then watch how someone interacts with a PowerPoint or whiteboard. There is animation and dimensional extension. The way people think and organize and communicate thoughts is multifaceted and multidimensional. It only makes sense that we should be able to work and program in the same way.

"Send me a link to a news story that turns out to be a video, or an audio file, and I’ll close it unconsumed: I haven’t got that kind of time. Send me a transcript: I’ll finish reading in half the time it would take me to passively sit there while it played, and I’ll more clearly remember it."

The author is ok with sitting and staring at the article because it's faster. What he misses is that it forces you to actually be in a position / context where you can read from the screen.

Personally I have been giving a lot of though about balancing how I consume content. Text vs audio. Walking / exercising or whatever instead of reading.

I don't believe we should optimise on "time to consume" but rather "healthiness of consume".

People here are suggesting that images/video are superior, but there's the cliche, "a picture is worth a thousand words". Well, which thousand words? Do they convey the same thousand words to you as they do to me?

Words leave nothing to the imagination. This is one of the most important traits of good exposition. Its arguments/messages are out there, free of the primate dominance gestures, the biases, the emotional stimulants, waiting to be vetted for their logical soundness.

Author is really excited about really old information technology. He makes some good points.

If all you mean is prose, as writing sentences in whatever native language you speak, then I must respectfully disagree with the OP.

Yes, text is marvelous. I'm an author of multiple books and have a passion for the written word, but there are things for which there are better ways to convey information.

A simple example is electronics. A circuit diagram is not text. It is a graphical representation using a standard notation. It is much easier to understand than spending paragraphs describing which component should connect to which other component.

Unless you decide that "text" should include such special representations. Then the question becomes: where do you draw the line between what you consider text and what is no longer text. In an isometric exploded view of some mechanical device text? Are architecture plans text? Because all those representations are better than the written word to convey their meaning...

Text is very powerful, but it doesn't need to always work by itself (arguably works best together with other media)

> text is the most powerful, useful, effective communication technology ever, period.

Nothing of this is actually true, period.

> I do not post to this blog with the intention of entertaining Hacker News Debate Club and I frequently disable comments or friend-lock posts in order to avoid this sort of nonsense. I'm not interested in further discussion.

Ah yes, the true seal of quality. (sarcasm)

- wood working, absolutely horrible to work from text, which I've done.

- group ideation, as much as I love IM'ing, audio + diagrams personally feels like a more effective way of communication.

- troubleshooting, too many times I've had to text my parents how to troubleshoot their router only to end up calling them and slowly talking them through it.

These are super specific, but I'd still wager audio and video trump text in a significant number of general scenarios that require communication of some kind.

Anything that needs read optimization i.e. this is information that needs to be communicated over and over, text is better. But often that's not a requirement.

The prominence and seeming economy of text in digital communications is probably because data is presented and transmitted as a one dimensional sequence of bits.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_painting

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing#Cuneiform_s...

[3] https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/pacifi...

Text is also why XML, JSON, and Markdown are a thing.

When you can accomplish your tasks within a constrained range of expressivity, you do that (gas & break pedals, steering wheel, door handles, etc). But when you need greater expressivity, you're probably going to need text.

You can of course do this with multimedia or any other encoding, but text is pretty great at on-the-fly extensibility.

Many humans are less inhibited when they’re typing than when they are speaking face-to-face. Teenagers are less shy. With cellphone text messages, they’re more likely to ask each other out on dates. That genre of software was so successful socially that it’s radically improving millions of people’s love lives (or at least their social calendars). Even though text messaging has a ghastly user interface, it became extremely popular with the kids. The joke of it is that there’s a much better user interface built into every cellphone for human to human communication: this clever thing called “phone calls.”

It's not just dates. It's "How ru?" & "running 3m late" and such. This has advanced to where text messaging is now a distinct written dialect, unintelligible to someone from 1993. Meanwhile, voice messages and such are more peripheral... even though they now work through the same UIs and we all have earpieces in our ears anyway. Text is powerful.

That said, text is not always the most powerful media. Photos/selfies and such have become a major 1-to-1 communication medium too. I often find that a phone conversation way more efficient than an email chain.

I also think there are categories of writing that shouldn't be. "Number articles" where an article is describing a company's financial's, for example. A lot of newspapers try to describe a table in essay form. The table would be better. That is still text though, in the sense that this article uses the term.

Choosing the most powerful medium or submedium is crucially important.

I disagree. Drawing pictures is the oldest communication technology. Pictures evolved into text eventually. Characters in early texts frequently are just small pictures. Understanding pictures is easier than understanding text because of smaller cognitive load.

Text helps with 2 things: condensing information and manipulating abstractions that don't have an unambiguous visual representation (such as hope or price). But it comes at the price of needing to learn the alphabet and dictionary and apply them to mentally decode what is otherwise just a cryptic drawing.

Text may be more efficient in some cases, but say it's better universally is moot. For instance, texts are very bad for representing non-linear, concurrent workflows. Pictures are way more better in this case.

>Text is the most efficient communication technology.

It heavily depends on what you're going to communicate. For a blog post, text may be better. In other cases, a picture may be worth a thousand of words.

The article may have good points, but it's full of poor statements.

Given the current state of information technology, I agree that we are most efficient at processing text. However, that can change pretty quickly. Storage mechanisms similar to DNA can make the difference between text and multimedia irrelevant. It will happen because nature already does that.

Compare all of that to text, which is at least thousands of years old. And then compare text to speech, which is hundreds of thousands of years old. Had a way to record and replay audio been developed before writing, it’s likely that you’d be listening to this comment right now, not reading it.

I’d say we’re at the extreme beginning of a highly audiovisual age. A millennium or two from now, writing “dead” words might seem as ancient to our descendants as foot messengers appear to us: useful for particular purposes but mostly irrelevant.

On a related note, the concept of logocentrism seems relevant here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logocentrism

Sometimes it seems to mean ‘the English language’ or ‘language’ more broadly. Other times it seems to mean ‘strings of ASCII encoded Latin letters’. Sometimes it seems to mean ‘pictures of arrangements of letter like symbols’. In general it just amounts to ‘linear streams of data’.

Sure, if you define text that broadly, it covers a lot of things that are great.

But it’s a definition that’s so broad it defies its own terms. Text, defined that way, encompasses SVG files. Or even base64 encoded PNG files if you want. So that Twitter logo can be unambiguously shared through ‘text’ too. Look - here’s a tweet-sized version: https://twitter.com/bbcmicrobot/status/1237867433064464394?s...

But there’s a weird cultural bias built in to the assertion that all those things are ‘just text’. Sure, for someone who uses a US keyboard to type Latin alphabet characters left to right, base64 encoded binary, svg, or BBC BASIC, is ‘just text’. But that’s not exactly a universal perspective.

In the limit, this amounts to ‘always bet on data transmission and storage’.

A lot of the listed benefits of text are only realizable when the text is coupled with a specific ‘interpreter’ - be that an SVG renderer, a BBC micro, or a human who speaks English.

Doing stuff with text with computers is hard! Lexers, parsers and tokenizers are probably the most common sources of security bugs in history. And if the text is natural language, we still don’t have reliable computer tools for dealing with it - understanding or generating.

So I just guess I don’t really know what the point of this piece is. Data is all there is. Linear streams of data are often a thing. Because of the history of computing, western language character sets and conventions are often used to capture them in the same format as we use for written language.

I've seen some people pick up this medium very quickly, and others struggle for months with little progress. However, almost anyone can pickup Sketch or Illustrator for creating UI prototypes very quickly.

The expressiveness of text is not always a strength. It's very hard to build programming languages without text, but I strongly believe we still program too much when building UIs. Excel demonstrates that people can quickly pickup a minimal programming language for connecting data to UI, I think an Excel-Sketch hybrid is where the future lies for building applications in particular.

This is why in my 3D virtual space for work, Jel, fully collaborative text panels (synchronized via OT) are the primary kind of element you create: https://jel.app.

Drawings, sculptures, JPG files, videos etc. are more precise and are better at conveying a specific object or event, but not necessarily its meaning.

If I remember correctly, Neal Stephenson's Anathem deals with some of these themes.

Author should be conveying the unique aspects of Textual media but also it’s shortcomings. Comments here should be discussing the benefits and shortcomings of all kinds of media.

Instead both are discussing which one is better - Text or something else. A lot of it is mutually exclusive. The Tianamen square tank man image is powerful and impossible to encode in text with the same effect, and Nabokov’s prose is impossible to paint a picture of or how we struggle to describe tasting notes.

I have to learn decimal numbers: my intended audience needs to learn decimal numbers. But the resulting efficacy is a thousandfold. I think of letters and words like digits, but for communicating broader concepts.

So when we lack the symbols or combinations to express something, we need a unique picture to do so. Pictures are worth a thousand words, but only when a thousand words won’t suffice.

If text’s so darn great, after all, why do you need to draw a picture of it before I can understand it?

The author is saying that because pictures cannot easily capture arbitrary sentences, text is better. But the same applies with the roles reversed: text cannot capture arbitrary pictures! Instead of saying that one is better than the other outright, let’s move to media (for reading, composing, and programming) where the two can be intermingled appropriately, with as little friction as possible. We certainly have the technology for it...

To take an analogy, think of writing text as analogous to compressing data using a Huffman code. Our ideas correspond to the initial uncompressed data, natural language text corresponds to compressions of those source data, while our brains correspond to the Huffman tree that tells you how to decompress. With our brains/context we can recover the initial ideas, just like with the Huffman tree we can recover the uncompressed data. Without the Huffman tree, the compressed data are gibberish.

On the one hand this means that text is really powerful as the author says; we can store an incredible amount of information in a small amount space, and can reconstruct the source idea the text represents efficiently (if with some amount of ambiguity and error).

On the other hand text is very far from universal. Anyone who sees the Twitter logo sees the exact same thing (interpreting it as a bird, of course, requires the prior knowledge of what a bird is and looks like). However, anyone who sees a piece of text not only needs to understand the language it's written in, but also all of the ideas that it refers to. That's why we still have many examples of languages and texts that are undecipherable: we've lost the context they were originally written in. Even Egyptian hieroglyphics were undecipherable until the 1800s when people used the Rosetta stone to provide context to decipher it.

Text has further issues as well, chief among them its ambiguity. Not only is it easy to under-specify things in text, but it's also possible for the same piece of text to mean different things at different times and places.

As a culture these issues may be strengths; poetry and literature derive strength from this openness to interpretation, and many would argue so does law where statutes written centuries ago can be adapted to our time. But from a purely data storage and transmission perspective, these are clear weaknesses.

My point is that context matters a lot, and (I assume) that it can only be reconstructed through a lot of text.

Obviously the best computer tools offer both visual and textual ways of working. But if you have to pick one, bet on text.

I was about to add a caveat about pure visual tasks, like image composition, but advances like DALL-E are starting to put those tasks into question as well. If I were making a photo editor today, I would bet on text.

Just because our current technology is best able to handle and deal with text says nothing about the power of sound, images, sketches, drawings and handwritten notes.

  > suggests choosing the least powerful [computer] language suitable for a given purpose

This argument is pretty trivially false.

By this logic, the best programming language is assembly, because it's the most general. Actually, writing opcodes directly might be more general, in case your assembler doesn't have translations for some undocumented opcodes. The best editor would be a hex editor. The best web browser would be netcat piped into a hex editor, as well. The best OS would be no OS at all (because OSes impose restrictions in order to make programming easier and safer). The best application, for any kind of application, would be an interpreter that would allow you to create your own, however you wanted.

Engineering is necessarily a tradeoff between generality and efficiency. Technology is largely used to make things more efficient, and so our tools always impose some constraints on the problem/solution space in order to be more efficient than not using that tool.

A common design pattern is a specialized fast-path and slower (but more general) fallback.

In addition, as many others have stated here: "the right tool for the right job". Videos, audio, pictures, and interactive tools will always be more efficient for certain problems. If your sole concern is generality, then yes, by all means, use text. However, this will almost never happen; your design space will almost always necessitate a tradeoff of generality with efficiency - in which case, pure plain text is rarely the solution.

Like any "hard and fast" rule, however, it tends to go a bit pear-shaped, when viewed from certain contexts.

As someone that has made the mistake of designing a "pure" iconic interface, I can tell you that alternatives to text UI can be quite difficult to implement[0].

But a well-designed symbolic UX can be leaps and bounds more effective than text.

In some contexts.

Basically, YMMV.

The main issue with text, is that is assumes that:

1) Everybody can read, and

B) Everybody is on the same page.

In any given day, I notice written signs everywhere. But the really important stuff tends to be done symbolically.

Notably, caution/danger signs and other warnings.

Road signs are almost always text, but the same thing I just mentioned, applies to important cautionary road signs. You can assume that anyone driving can read (written road test), so why use icons?

That's because we can process symbols much more quickly and effectively than text. A well-designed icon can be instantly recognizable. Take, for example, the classic radiation or biohazard icons.

They still need "training" to properly interpret; but nothing like the level of education required to simply read (and understand) the word "BIOHAZARD."

    ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣠⡖⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⢲⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
    ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣼⡏⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢹⣧⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
    ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣸⣿⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⣿⣇⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
    ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣿⣿⡇⠀⢀⣀⣤⣤⣤⣤⣀⡀⠀⢸⣿⣿⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
    ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢻⣿⣿⣔⢿⡿⠟⠛⠛⠻⢿⡿⣢⣿⣿⡟⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
    ⠀⠀⠀⠀⣀⣤⣶⣾⣿⣿⣿⣷⣤⣀⡀⢀⣀⣤⣾⣿⣿⣿⣷⣶⣤⡀⠀⠀⠀⠀
    ⠀⠀⢠⣾⣿⡿⠿⠿⠿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡿⠏⠻⢿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠿⠿⠿⢿⣿⣷⡀⠀⠀
    ⠀⢠⡿⠋⠁⠀⠀⢸⣿⡇⠉⠻⣿⠇⠀⠀⠸⣿⡿⠋⢰⣿⡇⠀⠀⠈⠙⢿⡄⠀
    ⠀⡿⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠘⣿⣷⡀⠀⠰⣿⣶⣶⣿⡎⠀⢀⣾⣿⠇⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⢿⠀
    ⠀⡇⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠹⣿⣷⣄⠀⣿⣿⣿⣿⠀⣠⣾⣿⠏⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢸⠀
    ⠀⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⠻⢿⢇⣿⣿⣿⣿⡸⣿⠟⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⠀
    ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⣼⣿⣿⣿⣿⣧⡀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
    ⠀⠀⠀⠐⢤⣀⣀⢀⣀⣠⣴⣿⣿⠿⠋⠙⠿⣿⣿⣦⣄⣀⠀⠀⣀⡠⠂⠀⠀⠀
    ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⠉⠛⠛⠛⠛⠉⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⠉⠛⠛⠛⠛⠋⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

I have learned the hard way, not to get too creative, when presenting GUI. I've learned to use platform conventions, and ISO symbols[1], where possible; even if I am not that thrilled with the aesthetics.

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/the-road-most-travel...

[1] https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/

Yes, Text, Text, Text - The past, present and future of writing (and publishing).

[1] https://github.com/officetxt/awesome-txt

There is a strong opinion (which I share) that text coding is much more efficient than 'graphical' alternatives due to text flexibility and nice features ( easy compare, universal medium...)

Cute, overly self congratulatory turns of word aside, this had me look up the etymology of text. I hadn’t put it together before, but woven is such a fitting root for the fabric of our thoughts made manifest.

Most people in the world are not. Or don't speak English at all, another problem with text that you don't find with images.

To be needlessly pedantic, my computer drew the image that conveyed this to me.

Less pedantically text is a medium of exchange for language, and a lossy one just like spoken word. I think there's a lot of power in its flexibility due to that lossiness. It's also one of its subtle weaknesses - we can read text from 5,000 years ago, but there's going to be much debate over understanding the text because of how much context has been lost to time.

the least studied 'character' of this alphabet is the most imporant, the most critical character in any phonetic alphabet is the blank space. withoutitphoneticwritingsdoesnotmakesasmuchsesnse.

> Master Foo said nothing, but pointed at the moon. A nearby dog began to bark at the master's hand.

> “I don't understand you!” said the programmer.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/gui-programmer....

image: https://imgur.com/a/8J6yeRe

> It can be translated.

It needs to be translated. No such issue with photos.

Images are wonderful if you don't live in a bubble where everybody speaks the same language.

I design systems using both diagrams and text sometimes laid out in understood, non-linear patterns. I also enjoy music.

I don't know much about it, but there in a talk, Jordan Peterson addressed that there are people who can think in text, in pictures or even both. And that trait says a lot about ones character.

Interesting stuff

One was only text.

I’ve been watching videos of pets (dogs, cats) being “button trained”—being taught to use (primitive, non-syntactic) language by making associations between things/acts/emotional states and the pressing of one or another audio-playing buttons that has been placed on the floor.

It has very much driven home the point for me, that “spoken language” is actually not something inherent and instinctual to humans (or to any species); but rather is a technology. It’s just a technology that’s rather simple to learn, if you have the right underlying hardware acceleration (e.g. a cerebral cortex)—and, crucially, a teacher. For other intelligent mammals, apparently the teacher is the only component they’re missing!

Language is a technology that humans in particular find very intuitive—at least at a young age when our brains are malleable—but not one we inherently start with. We absorb it easily if we’re immersed in a society where everybody uses language from birth. But in situations where that’s not true (feral children, some very broken homes) we don’t.

In a world where every human being instantly had all entrained structure in their neocortex erased, such that we were “reduced” to being upright hairless apes with the capacity for language but no knowledge of it, I don’t think we’d just instantaneously come up with the idea of language and begin attempting to develop languages to communicate, the way modern people instantly try to develop a creole of the languages they do know, when stuck in a situation with people who share no common language with them.

The idea to associate concepts with specific mouth-noises—and to condition others to use those same mouth-noises for the same concepts, to facilitate transmission of thought—might randomly arise in a few people, but it’d need to catch on and spread from there, just like any other technology. It would either need to be observed and copied, or actively taught.

And I hypothesize that that is what happened (pre)historically: at some point, there were several memetic “waves” spreading increasingly-technologically-advanced (e.g. syntactic, expressive) forms of language across human populations with brains already structurally amenable to them. Of course, each wave would only be a struggle to the generation that pioneered it; the next generation, being immersed in that new, more-complex language form from birth, would find it similarly intuitive.

(This makes me wonder whether we’ve yet hit the “limits of linguistic expressiveness” for our current brain size, such that we’d need to unlimit e.g. average skull diameter at birth to let us get any fancier with language; or whether we’ve still got some, ah, “headroom” left.)

As a human being, it is quite possible to have verbal intelligence higher than spatial intelligence, and indeed I know some people with verbal tilt and some other people with spatial tilt. These people tend to think & approach problems differently, while having different strengths and weaknesses. Naturally, similar people cluster together, and some professions (e.g. lawyers, journalists, writers, programmers) are more amenable to verbally tilted persons, while other professions (mechanical engineering, airplane piloting, architecture) are amenable to spatially tilted persons.

Looking around via this lens, discerning cognitive styles inherent in design of the human experience is enlightening. One can see that our physical and social, educational environments and governing institutions are designed with one cognitive style in mind at the expense of the other: and this privilege goes to verbal cognitive style.

Let me offer a different perspective: to a person with higher spatial and weaker verbal cognition, this environment looks physically simplistic, tasteless, sometimes outright boring, often suffocatingly so. Utilitarian safety & simplicity prevailing over beauty and shape-being, denying the inhabitants possibilities of space meaningful by itself. Letters, words, strings of words are everywhere, starting with high-school where the recent historical trend of increasing verbalization of curriculum continues, and on to adult life where verbally intensive professions pay more and command significantly more power (note how in the aforementioned occupation list the second one contains less status-worthy & more specialized occupations). Limitless possibilities of rendered worlds on megapixel screens collapse into a flat-designed abstract hellscape of recursively composed words and menus. The brain of the child - a pinnacle of neuroplasticity - adapts, as relentless march of critical developmental periods continues, unnecessary white matter pathways wither away, while economically useful ones are potentiated and strengthened for the forthcoming endless competition with similar human beings, similarly shaped. The best and brightest in this game of words become lawyers and career politicians, movers and shakers of our world; but are they truly our best, and do they truly imagine the referents of their symbols ? Are we led by seeing or blind ?

Much could be said about benefits of verbal thinking, endless composability (to some, vacuous, denying interesting constrained structure) of syntax & grammar & semantics, and rightly so. Yet one wonders, which avenues of thought, of being, both alone and together as a people, were not taken. How a civlization of prevailing gestalt could look like ? Confronted with this state of affairs, one wonders, if "Always betting on text", pedal-to-the-metal, more-of-the-same is really going to bring us somewhere at all ?

If you, dear reader, have some latent spatial/geometrical imagination which was pushed away by economically profitable word manipulation engines that grew through you, maybe you too wonder about this question.

(Just kidding. Fantastic article.)

What's interesting is pretty much all file formats are still readable (The media they are stored on is often not)

If you have the file it should be readable with a program you can find on Google.

On topic, No, although the article might be technically correct the biggest thing holding back many consumer products is lack of ability for non-text.

Signal had massive issues for years because it didn't have emoji. Now it's up with the rest. It's so much easier now you can copy a photo from Signal.

Like all these apps it needs work, like where's my real gun emoji. But they'll get there.

Text has all the same properties as an image.

It’s a composite of elements of varying height, width, and meaning to the whole.

Some sentences can be longer, or shorter. One element can be overloaded with meaning more than another.

I’m not really sure if there’s a point here at all.

And from the claims it makes ("text is the oldest") it seems either forgot about it, or is not even aware such thing exists.