Absolutely, because they have the time for it and fewer alternatives. I got my mom a tablet, set her up with ReVanced YouTube & Twitter plus VLC, and now she is by far the heaviest user of our NAS, last Kindle user on our Amazon account, and reachable on Signal pretty much always.
Would it be better if she sat at home with the TV on and a paper book? No, I don't think so.
This is also where the leisure time went. Keynes predicted 15 hour workweek, we decided to just have kids and the elderly not work at all.
My dad watches niche car repair videos on YouTube and my mom does online art classes. Back when we didn’t have fast internet, my mom would watch crappy reality TV shows out of boredom.
I think overall, the internet is taking up more of their time than books/tv did in the past (just as it does for me), but it also gives them access to quality content within their niche interests.
I'm certain there is a lot more very good content on YT than anywhere on TV, but that's unfortunately not the content that google is pushing toward the users.
(Yes, I'm aware that they push whatever the users click onto and whatever makes them profit; I don't care, I still believe they should push the best content).
That’s true for most mass market crap but that’s a low bar because it’s all just escapism in a different format. Books still have a much higher signal to noise ratio and information density than all content short of academic textbooks or courses (and I’ll die on that hill).
Sapiens is a good example of that kind of mass market crap. I’m currently reading After the Ice by Mithen and The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow which are much better attempts at pop-academia takes at early human history. Even just the notes section of those books is a goldmine for sources that you’d be hard pressed to find anywhere else outside a dense textbook.
Now with AI it’s easier than ever to stick to the good (nonfiction) stuff. Ask it for book recommendations and then ask it to search online for criticisms/reviews of their accuracy. I used to double check the sources for the reviews but never found any broad strokes inaccuracies.
> That's true for most mass market crap but that's a low bar because it's all just escapism in a different format.
Well one could make the same argument for other sources of media.
As far as SNR goes, I think you're overextended there too. A good science video on YouTube can communicate information through diagrams and animations that only textbooks even try, and animations often work better for me than long winded paragraphs of explaining something.
I think arguing whether one spends time reading a book vs watching a YouTube video is a silly exercise. The more important question is what book/video one is reading/watching.
So from the perspective the GP's point that books have a more than deserved reputation for being a better way to spend your time has some validity imo.
> Sapiens is a good example of that kind of mass market crap.
I think Sapiens is an interesting case, because, in my situation, I listened to the audiobook and enjoyed the experience.
I enjoyed it so much that I started to question everything I was hearing and spent at least twice as many hours checking what the author said than listening.
To the point that now I completely forgot the content of the book, but learned about so many things that I would probably had no reason to learn about without the book.
So it acted as a gateway with me.
Meanwhile I know of other people who took it as gospel and are now living with a polarized mindset.
IMO this kinda illustrates my point about cultural cachet. Going down a Wikipedia-driven rabbit hole doesn't have cultural cachet. Looking up sources from a prestigious book does have cultural cachet. But they are sort of the same activity?
"[The Dawn of Everything] suffers from serious shortcomings: the authors’ commitment to an excessively idealist view of historical dynamics, their use of rhetorical strategies that misguide their audience, and their resultant inability to account for broad trajectories of human development."
You don't read, typically, for fact-ness. The more facts you know doesn't mean your mind works better or you're smarter. Those are pretty much separate things.
Books are mostly for comprehension and critical thinking.
The problem with facts is that they're a bit anti-critical thinking. They're just true - there's no debate, or philosophy, or introspection.
Fiction makes you think. About the world, about the future, about yourself, about who you want to be, about what life is about, about why you exist, about love, about injustice, etc. Facts don't really do that.
If I had a kid, I would be tempted to have them play Slay the Spire as a homework assignment, to teach practical arithmetic and critical thinking. (No reading wikis or discussion forums; you have to figure out the best strategies for yourself!)
>About the world, about the future, about yourself, about who you want to be, about what life is about, about why you exist, about love, about injustice, etc.
This statement is also true for movies, TV shows, AskReddit discussions, etc. Yet they don't have the same cultural cachet as fiction.
There's no one stopping you from engaging in critical thought watching a YouTube video either. And some of the most interesting conversations I've had with my partner about the world and relationships have come after watching a TV show or playing a game together. Screens are just another medium folks.
Here are some books I've read from semi-recently which felt like they had "about a blog post's worth of useful information" (probably an exaggeration, but still):
Oftentimes such books will repeat their core points over and over, or include a lot of detail which feels irrelevant/overly technical and I will soon forget. In my experience, it's surprisingly common for books written for a general audience to include technical details and descriptions which are only meaningful for a specialist. Even though the book is hundreds of pages long, and there's plenty of room, the author still doesn't provide the necessary background knowledge to interpret the technical details they're including.
>Most books I read have a lot of information, if they didn't I would stop reading.
If you go to a bookstore and flip through a lot of the recently released stuff, especially the celebrity books, a lot of them are really thin on content. Especially if you grew up reading dense novels and textbooks, it can be surprising to see what the mass market for books is like.
That's a tiny slice of the books on the market though and these are books that weren't already proven to be good by the test of time. I don't think most books sold are recently released by a huge margin. The only publication where recently released matters are specifications, papers, documentation and news, but these tend to be mostly online or digital these days.
With age your company dwindles as people drift away (or die) so you have fewer people with which to enjoy these activities and many become less attainable/enjoyable with lower physical strength and endurance.
Most of the current elderly also grew up in an era where they believed cities and urban areas were bad, so they moved out to the suburbs where everything is farther away and requires driving. It requires a lot more effort to do anything and they have effectively isolated themselves.
My grandparents who lived in a city could walk down the street, get groceries, and easily meet friends for a snack or chat. Even when they were alone, they were part of a community. My parents' generation all live far away from each other, struggle to get out of the house, and are scared of strangers.
My mom had access already. I just patched her app to not show ads, allow video downloads, and have nicer colors.
Twitter is also the best news app. You get the info, trend, and critical commentary (with people you follow boosted for you in the comments) all in one go.
Why capitalism? How about taxation and over-regulation? And if not that, what about envy? You could live like an Irish immigrant 100 years ago, with a wood stove and an outdoor latrine. But you’re not going to want that if everyone around you has got a/c, stainless steel appliances and a Toto washlet.
Are you convinced that people’s lives get better and that workers get paid more, every time, with less regulation? What about e.g. planned obsolescence or web enshittification or any other strategy where a company can increase its profits by making its product worse? What about mass consumer advertising that constantly manipulates people into buying stuff they don’t care about and wouldn’t have bought before by making them feel like it will give them unrelated things like status or family? Market competition doesn’t solve these problems, it spreads them.
> you could live like an irish immigrant
I think our society builds what we want to a really large degree. People get taught to feel like getting rich or middle class or whatever is what they should be doing, or like having the expensive car is important. We don’t pop put of the womb knowing what the hell we should want and we learn to want a whole lot of shit we could go without. Also, you’d really struggle to construct that lifestyle for yourself. The only places where land would be cheap enough to be proportional would be sparse places where most work would be hard to find. You’d still need to drive to your jobs presumably, since you wouldn’t have a computer, so you’re paying for a beater, maintenance, gas and insurance. you would probably want to avoid a salaried position because the vast majority of them are gonna want you to work more than 15 hours a week, which cuts you out of a lot of the best paying jobs. I’m not saying you couldn’t do it, but you’d have to have a lot of knowledge to do it. There’s a real barrier to entry there.
Would it be better if she sat at home with the TV on and a paper book? No, I don't think so.
This is also where the leisure time went. Keynes predicted 15 hour workweek, we decided to just have kids and the elderly not work at all.