My parents purchased an Olivetti electric for me as a birthday present (I was a weird kid). It was COOL. It had a little LCD window which could display about thirty characters at a time, and it had MEMORY! (2K, as I recall) And you could buy special memory cartridges from Olivetti which would store pages and pages of text in them. You could program macro keys with boilerplate text (I’m sure the law offices loved them). And it had auto-correct and a really slick key feel and it was wonderful. It was really a state of the art machine; kind of like owning the best buggy whip ever crafted.

Innumeracy is real and it is a problem.

But.

That doesn’t mean that I want my nice, text-oriented, written Web to turn into a TV show with high load times and lots of hiccuping. It seems like every time I go to a favorite site (case in point: the Onion), there are more and more video stories crowding out what I’m there to get: writing. I’m not a videophobe – I see the merit of this content, as I’ve noted. But video is intrinsically inefficient because it is based on sound and verbal language; it takes a news reporter 120 seconds to badly summarize what I could comprehensively review in 20 seconds. Video makes sense when the story is about a cat who can do backflips – I want to see that. For Mitt Romney’s tax policy, I want to see something more along the lines of written analysis.

The thing is, there’s already a place where video has primacy: the television. It’s OK that video is putting out tentacles and finding a home on the web. But let’s remember what this Web thingie is for – and not turn it into just another forum for the talking heads.

(H/T Colfax)