I’m not so sure. On the surface, video certainly appears to offer the same content that text does, and do it in a more engaging way. However, difficult as it may be to admit for a technologist, I believe video gives with one hand and takes away with the other.

Consider the way you read a text with intellectually challenging content.  You can speed up, slow down, re-play and pause effortlessly and elegantly compared to the effort of doing the same with a video player. Re-playing an idea on a video player isn’t just inelegant, it’s so inelegant that I imagine it’s almost never done, even when the consumer would benefit from considering the idea again. Indeed, far from making it easy to go back, video pushes relentlessly forward, force-feeding the next sentence with utter disregard as to whether you are finished with the last.

Some may retort that this argument smacks of intellectual elitism, and that video content makes material accessible to the less educated. I wonder whether such people are confusing functional illiteracy (mercifully rare, even if not rare enough) with learned helplessness. Facility with reading develops with practice, and suggesting that reading is too tough for large proportions of the population is defeatism. I’m not even sure if it’s true in the narrowest sense that it’s easier for people to understand video than text (though it may be easier to consume without understanding): I can read a newspaper in French with some success, but give me the same news report in video form and I’m quickly drowned in unfamiliar language.

It’s not just on the consumption side. Composing a text is (to me at least) a calm, intellectual and rewarding process, where care can be taken over structure and thoughts can be put down, picked up and re-polished until they represent the absolute limit of the author’s capabilities. No matter how video recording and editing technology improves, a video blog post still needs to be recorded in one or at most a small number of takes, and considerable effort must go just into making the delivery flow naturally, at the expense of actual content. I’ve paused several times during the writing of this post to re-think, even though I started writing with a fairly clear idea of what I wanted to say.

I’m not naive enough to suppose for a moment that these arguments, even if correct, will slow the adoption of video in place of text. In the end, we choose what to consume more with our instinct than with our intellect. I’d be happier if a few more people displayed evidence of understanding the down side, though.

Judged by this standard, Zambia fares quite well. The land is flat, dry, and under-developed, but it has a genuineness about it that immediately appeals. When I last came a few years ago, the most striking sight was of people walking alongside the road carrying sacks on their heads. It seemed to me that there were fewer of them this time round, and more people transporting goods by bicycle.

Apparently a cyclist transporting 4 large sacks of charcoal might earn 10,000 kwacha for a day’s effort in the hot sun. That would just about buy a sliced loaf in the supermarket we frequent.

The Swedes [...] have long spoken of “dandelion” children. These dandelion children—equivalent to our “normal” or “healthy” children, with “resilient” genes—do pretty well almost anywhere, whether raised in the equivalent of a sidewalk crack or a well-tended garden. Ellis and Boyce offer that there are also “orchid” children, who will wilt if ignored or maltreated but bloom spectacularly with greenhouse care.

It would be foolish to base decisions on this before more research has been developed further. But I wondered whether this model might offer some lessons to the software industry. Many companies set out to hire the most capable, intelligent people. Perhaps those that do so would do well to bear in mind that they will have a greater proportion of “orchids”: people who are capable of great things, but need the right environment to bring it about.

A little digging in the OED informed me that I am not actually correct in this pedantry. “Random” is a perfectly acceptable adjective meaning “arranged without goal or purpose”, in which form its use dates to the mid-17th century (so it isn’t a modern corruption). In point of fact, “haphazard” entered the language slightly later in the same century, and in this sense the words are synonymous.

However, I wonder if it wouldn’t be useful to enforce more of a distinction in the future, whatever the history of the language. Statistical randomness is a sense of “random” that came into use in the 19th century, but is increasingly important in modern times as we are persuaded of this fact or that fact by use of statistical analysis. If a drug is declared safe on the basis of “random” trials, you had better hope they are not merely haphazard.