Books vs. TV
by Tom Temple
16 May 2005
Some of you may have been following this argument over whether or not TV and videogames are bad for you.
Where did the whole anti-videogame thing come from in the first place? My theory is that they are from the early days of games when there was a lot of crack-cocaine given to kids in the form of tetris. These days, there is no question. Tetris is definitely bad for me. But originally, it was one of those quick thinking things that I might have help me develop. Likewise, pong is bad for me… so very, very bad for me. But it helped me grow up.
I guess the people who think that all videogames are tetris might have reason to think that games are bad. Get with the times you old farts. The example in the above article is Halo 2. To be good online in Halo 2 you need some skills. Some of these skills certainly are helpful in the rest of life and I don’t just mean the coordination.
Now about TV and books, I have always been pretty incredulous of the claim there is a qualitative difference between books and TV, in the light of the fact that they make movies out of books all the time. Or that Shakespear, the acme of worthwhileness in reading, wrote plays. You guys have to realize that they are just different media for the same product. We can argue about the relative advantages of the media but it is clearly impossible that one be good while the other is bad.
So on the TV side there is a bandwidth of what? a billion times that of a book? That is a pretty substantial advantage. Of course the brain is nowhere near the speed it would need to exploit that advantage fully. But there should be little doubt that AV media is substantially faster than text. But there is a benefit from going slower in that text is more expressive (at least the way that they are used generally).
I can tell you pretty certainly that before I went to college, I learned more from TV than I had from books. That isn’t to say that I didn’t read a lot; I did. I read pretty much the whole goddamn honors English book list. But for every one book I probably saw an episode or two of NOVA, a couple of specials on Discovery, 5+ Star Trek TNGs and two movies.
A lot of people make the argument that the book is better because the reader has to work harder. Maybe that sort of work is helpful in it’s own right but don’t pretend that that it makes the material any better. I had a Physics book (by Dirac) which, like a book from Harry Potter, wouldn’t let you open it until you smashed yourself in the testicles with it. Then it made you do it again every time you wanted to turn a page. Do you think that made me learn more physics?
It didn’t work for me, but I’ve heard some kids learn better like that.
May 16, 04:02 PM
Tom wrote: I learned more from TV than I had from books. [...] for every one book I probably saw an episode or two of NOVA, a couple of specials on Discovery, 5+ Star Trek TNGs and two movies.
Since I didn’t have a television at home when I was growing up (a conscious choice by my parents), my experience was different from yours. Sure, I watched plenty of TV, but I had to do it at other people’s houses. As a result, my book-to-tube ratio was far greater than 1, at any given moment, and I learned far more from books than from TV. Even today, I absorb information by reading a lot faster than by watching or listening.
I’m not here to disparage television. Still, I have always felt there are some big advantages that books have over TV, including the following:
1. It’s easier to pause, rewind, re-read, and reflect on printed words. You can physically rewind a recorded show, but it doesn’t give you the same experience, and in my experience, nobody does it except with really funny comedy routines.
2. It’s easier to compare and contrast the viewpoints given by different books, than those provided by different shows. You can set them down side by side, and it’s easy to compare notes because you don’t have to take them in serially, the way TV shows are organized.
3. At the end of a good academic book, there is a references section, so I can figure out where to go next, if I want to learn more.
TV has a powerful visual component that books lack, and some programs (notably NOVA) do make excellent use of that. It’s been my experience that TV conveys information more quickly, but in less detail. It’s easy to get a roadmap from a TV program, but very difficult to get any real depth on a subject.
And, sorry Tom, but I think your argument about bandwidth is completely bogus and irrelevant. What matters for learning is not how many bits you can put in front of the user per unit time, but how many of those bits actually impress into your long-term memory. That rate does depend upon the mode of transmission, but not in the manner or to the degree you’re suggesting.
May 16, 07:43 PM
No, of course, your right. For real learning, i.e. school/college learning, the TV just doesn’t have that kind of material. The distinctions you make are good ones, I don’t dissagree. But I think most of it is simply that the good material is in books and very little of it is in other media. I think this is predominantly for convenience. For instance, I had this class that taped the lectures and put them on the web. Oh my god was it ever nice, it was even better than actually sitting there. I have never learned so quickly from a book. Do you think you learned more from lectures than books? I certainly did. I can imagine future electronic journals that include lectures.
What I was trying to talk about instead was recreation—reading and TV for fun. Sometimes I read for fun and other times I watch TV for fun (honestly I do very little of either these days since I got gamefly). Really what I had in mind were the Harry Potter books and the Harry Potter movies.
May 17, 07:43 AM
Do you think you learned more from lectures than books?
That’s a tricky question. I find that lectures alone don’t teach me much. Books teach me more, but very, very slowly and painstakingly. When I have a book and some lectures, I learn way more than I would have gotten from the book alone—so I think you are definitely on the right track.
Incidentally, speaking of recorded lectures: A large proportion of engineering lectures at Stanford University are now recorded, and available to their students on the web. I’m not sure if they are only accessible to Stanford students, or if they can be obtained more generally, but it’s clearly a phenomenon that is gaining traction. I think that is probably a Good Thing™.
Jul 17, 01:50 PM
I would prefer to take a neutral stand on the topic as a whole, but personally speaking i would prefer books anytime.It gives you a wide range of imagination which is hardly the case with television.In books you get to see from YOUR perspective while in television you are forced to see from the director’s point of view.
Lets take the example of harry potter books Vs. movies.It goes even before saying that the books are in much demand than the movie.Sure, you get to watch the whole stuff in 2-3 hrs time but the impact will not be the same.Books give you a higher insight into the situation.Nov 12, 01:40 AM
Arguments were somewhat convincing initially but later you seemed to have lost track and relied on emotive thinking. this emotive thinking took you away from reality and influenced you to come up with recommendations (most) that are unrealistic.
Otherwise a very well written article