Have you ever played cards in a poker room? Probably not. The modern day set-up is a room with tables and large ceiling and wall mounted flat-screen TV panels.
That was how I watched most of the inauguration coverage yesterday–glancing up at the monitors while waiting to act on my hand. The usual TV Commentary was provided by the closed captioning (often incorrectly spelled) which scrolled by.
The commentary was shown verbatim. It was easy to judge how fast or slow the spoken words were. Slow. Very, very slow. Reading is orders of magnitude faster than speaking.
One of the problems TV has to face is it’s a less efficient conveyor of speech than printed or displayed words. If ‘all’ a news story has going for it is words it’s automatically way behind the Internet!
My actions show I discovered this viscerally a while ago even though I wasn’t able to intellectualize it until yesterday. I seldom watch TV videos repackaged for the Internet. When I do watch it’s because I’ve been led to believe the content is more compelling than a simple story of words.
How surprisingly anti-intuitive to come to this conclusion. If television programmers don’t face this fact they’re done.