I've observed that consuming certain kinds of media make me smarter and other kinds of media makes me dumber.
Makes me dumber:
- Videogames
- YouTube
- News
Makes me smarter:
- Books
- Audiobooks
- Direct messaging apps
By "smarter" I mean it holistically causes me to behave in a way that increases my overall rate of learning and quality of life. By "dumber" I mean the opposite.
For a long time I rejected this conclusion. Surely playing Kerbal Space Program must be more educational than reading Yu-gi-oh! manga. Nope. Yu-gi-oh! beats it by a long shot. I ran a long series of subjective personal experiments on a variety of timescales over many years. They all confirmed this theory[1]. The medium overpowers the message.
What I am watching on TV is irrelevant compared against the fact that I am watching TV.
I can even plot different mediums on a scale from "makes me dumber" to "makes me smarter" and it use to infer why different mediums have the effect they do.
- Makes Me Dumber
- [BAD & DANGEROUS] Videogames
- [BAD & DANGEROUS] Media feeds
- [BAD & DANGEROUS] YouTube
- [BAD & ADDICTIVE] News
- [BAD] Stack Exchange
- [BAD] Web surfing
- Blogs
- Movies
- Webcomics
- Comic books (fiction)
- [OKAY] Books (fiction)
- [OKAY] Podcasts
- [OKAY] Direct messaging (native language)
- [GOOD] Audiobooks (nonfiction)
- [GOOD] Books (nonfiction)
- [GOOD] Direct messaging (foreign language)
- [GOOD] Blogging
- [GOOD] Books (textbooks)
- [GOOD] Writing software
- [VERY GOOD] Making videos
- [VERY GOOD] Drawing comics
- [VERY GOOD] Spaced Repetition Software
- Makes Me Smarter
There is a symmetry to this sorting. Playing videogames is near the top but writing software is near the bottom. Watching YouTube is near the top but making YouTube videos is near the bottom. The smarter creating a certain kind of media makes me the dumber consuming it does.
In fact, this whole list is just sorted by difficulty. The harder a medium is to consume (or create, as applicable) the smarter it makes me. The difficulty of consuming a medium is dominated by the medium itself, not its content.
That feels wrong. Intuitively, it makes sense that certain mediums should facilitate better content and that's why they're educational. Nope. For me, it's the medium itself.
There are handful of exceptions. In particular, downloading certain kinds of videos from YouTube and watching them locally can make me smarter. But even this illustrates the power of the medium. Watching YouTube in a web browser has a different effect on me than downloading those exact same videos and watching them with
mplayer. ↩︎
Firstly, some topics are just easier if they can be presented the right format. Geometry will be easier in a format that allows diagrams, compared to an audiobook. Secondly, formats, like websites are often Schelling points, not many serious scientists publish their work as a series of gifs on twitter. Most scientists know this, and so don't look for a series of gifs on twitter. Then there are affordances, a video of a maths lecture on Youtube, (there are quite a few uni lectures that have been filmed and put on Youtube) might be informative, but have links to lolcats all down the side. If the medium distracts you, you will learn less.
There is also a sense of making use of the medium. Take the medium of videogame. In principle a video game can display an arbitrary pattern of pixels on a screen. However, suppose that the pattern of pixels most suited to learning some topic looks like pages of text. There is no point making a videogame, just to reimplement a document reader in it. So all the people trying to make serious learning resources use text documents. Any video game that is made is full of interactive widgets that aren't that useful for learning, and is usually targeted at those with too little attention span to read much text.
A lot of the time, I would recommend going for any format in which the information you want is explained by someone who knows the subject and is good at teaching. If the subject is obscure, go for anywhere that you can find the info at all. If distraction is a big problem for you, download the Youtube videos that you intend to watch, unplug your router and then watch them.