Why Television Still Shines in a World of Screens

Consistent, daily screen-reading is changing how we read: we skim and skip. What may (or may not) be lost is the facility for sustained, immersive reading. Print requires that we push our eyes across the page to get the reading to happen. There’s an effort involved. A burden, even. In contrast, video requires much less work. We can’t read when we are tired, but we can watch television.

Stross asserts that we’ve passed a tipping point: that screen media so dominates our daily lives that we are losing our inclination to access print.

TextTelevision is a New England new media startup that reshapes text to provide a new, more fluid, immersive, video-like reading experience on a screen. Here’s Franklin Roosevelt’s Inaugural Address in the worst of the Great Depression:

http://www.textflows.com/FDR_1933_speech

Still very timely today.