Do We Still Need Books?

Principle of Charity

This special episode was recorded live at the 2024 Sydney Writers’ Festival with Emile and Lloyd joined on stage by eminent philosopher A.C Grayling and digital content creator Mary McGillivray. Together they consider the merits and pitfalls of various forms of factual information distribution.

This is arguably the greatest time in the history of the world for reading, with literally the entirety of human knowledge available in books or in the online world of articles, blogs etc. If you want to develop a deep understanding of the world we live in, you just have to read. But with the rise of online video platforms like YouTube and TikTok, many people - young people in particular, are getting their factual content, not from reading, but from these alternative sources.

Research has shown that we are evolutionarily adapted to taking in knowledge audiovisually - we apparently process video images 60,000 times faster than text - and that reading, as a form of communication is complex and inefficient.

For a long time, reading was the only available technology to disseminate ideas beyond the campfire, fuelled most powerfully by the invention of the printing press. Now that we have the technology to create video content, which sits most naturally with the way we’re evolved to take in information, maybe we should thank reading for its help in bridging the techno- gap, and let our books collect dust as we finally return to the way we most naturally absorb knowledge about the world.

In this conversation we look at the tsunami of non-fiction video content that has taken so many young people’s attention away from the written word, and ask whether it’s a merciful release from the boring and inefficient world of reading, a release into a promised land of enlivened, engaging, memorable video content, or whether it signals a slow spiral into a shallow, unfocused, unimaginative and insubstantial way of understanding of the world we live in.

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You can be part of the discussion @PofCharity on Twitter, @PrincipleofCharity on Facebook and @PrincipleofCharityPodcast on Instagram.

Your hosts are Lloyd Vogelman and Emile Sherman.

Find Lloyd @LloydVogelman on Linked in

Find Emile @EmileSherman on Linked In and Twitter.

This Podcast is Produced by Jonah Primo and Sabrina Organo

Find Jonah at jonahprimo.com or @JonahPrimo on Instagram

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