I do sometimes look up details about a show I’m watching, but I’m with the author on this, I can’t fully keep track of what’s going on if I’m not watching.
Moreover, I prefer to watch with subtitles because I feel like I absorb information drastically better if I read it. On that point, I pretty much hate watching YouTube videos to learn anything - I’d rather read the docs and my favorite sources tend to be things like a programming language’s official documentation or the manual for whatever software I’m using (Logic Pro X comes to mind - I’d much rather read factual, authoritative text on a feature than watch some random YouTuber talk for 10 minutes and try to get me to subscribe to his or her channel while I could have easily read the docs in half the time). I think a big part of this “text vs video/audio” learning dilemma is that you can’t easily skim a videos contents and intuitively know what to skip and what parts are interesting. Text will always have its place.
I feel you so much on this one. Visuals certainly help me, but i would take a purely written source over a purely video one any day of the week (talking only about learning material throughout this whole comment btw). For one, with readable sources i can go at my own pace, set pauses, skip over parts that i already know or find to be fluff, etc. The source and the structure of a written source are one and the same, which allows me to consume the material in the way that is personally the most efficient for me. With videos, i have zero control of the flow and zero knowledge of the structure of the material, let alone being able to traverse the structure and control it. This alone makes videos way less efficient for me.
The only scenario where i would prefer videos for learning something are when the material is very short in length and very single-minded, like “explaining how that one specific formula works and how it is used for that one specific application and why” or when i need to fill a small gap in my knowledge of something. And even then, there is some potential for the creator of such video to misuse the video and pad it with fluff and poor narration, though this is not unique to video as a medium and can be done in a text-based material as well.
Yep. I wonder if there’s been a bunch of research on the topic and it really boils down to us just being written versus visual learners, or if it has to do with something like age-bias - maybe because YouTube wasn’t really a thing yet when I was a teen I never caught the bug. I’ve noticed it seems like kids these days love watching YouTube videos to learn stuff I would never watch videos on, like programming.
I had the same hypothesis as you about the generational preferences kind of thing, but personal anecdata seems to run against it. I am in my mid twenties, have plenty of friends spanning from early twenties to early thirties (with a few in their late 30s/early 40s), and have noticed zero correlation between the age and their willingness and preference to learn things from youtube videos vs. written sources.
Not accounting for some specific types of things (e.g., I cannot for the life of me learn intricate details of operating physical things like fixing something on a motorcycle without a video, despite heavily preferring written sources for learning otherwise), the general preference for learning through youtube vs. reading seems to come down (at least from what I've observed) purely to the individual's own preference.
Moreover, I prefer to watch with subtitles because I feel like I absorb information drastically better if I read it. On that point, I pretty much hate watching YouTube videos to learn anything - I’d rather read the docs and my favorite sources tend to be things like a programming language’s official documentation or the manual for whatever software I’m using (Logic Pro X comes to mind - I’d much rather read factual, authoritative text on a feature than watch some random YouTuber talk for 10 minutes and try to get me to subscribe to his or her channel while I could have easily read the docs in half the time). I think a big part of this “text vs video/audio” learning dilemma is that you can’t easily skim a videos contents and intuitively know what to skip and what parts are interesting. Text will always have its place.