Apparently English speakers aren't the only ones with the proverb similar to "a picture is worth a thousand words," as the Japanese have the saying that "hearing 100 times is not worth seeing just once." Applies in a lot of contexts.
Recently with the acquisition of my nifty GoPro camera (very proud!) I am able to record dodgeball videos and watch myself on camera, it's a huge difference. A whole new world opens up to me. I used to write these long essays to teammates about what happened in a match, how to get better, what our strategy for the next game is, but sometimes a streaming video just does the job much better. That's why facebook, instagram, emojis, etc. are so much more popular in the modern world (and rightfully so) than letters, phone conversations, and other all-text or all-word communications were back in the day (as in, like 20 years ago when all those old things were still in vogue), actually even email! What communication styles have a leg up on nowadays is just to use a picture to express so many different concepts right away. Even a "heart" emoji or a "happy" emoji does the job better than expressing that in so many words, people just get more of a reaction (at least I do) and more of a common sense from those pictures than just mere words. That's why movies are excelling while books are dwindling, emails are written less with words than memes or gifs, it's a whole new way of conversation. I personally don't necessarily love this new development, I think there's still a pureness in using language and words to express oneself, but for better or worse that's what the world is trending towards, and I don't necessarily blame anyone.
Even in this blog, I've taken to adding a picture to some of the blog posts knowing that the picture will be part of the post, and will instantly get more attention than the text. Text is boring and wordy and long to read; people's attention spans stretch so much less than they did even ten or twenty years ago; gotta get the point across immediately or else you get the dreaded "TL;DR" (Too Long; Did not Read.) - again not exactly something I like, but is definitely prevalent in today's society so you gotta play by the rules.
Baseball statistics are a huge example of pictures (or rather, videos) being better as well. There can be tons of data gathered about a player like his walk rate, strikeout rate, ERA, strand rate, groundball ratio, each one sounding more sophisticated than the next, but there's really nothing that compares to actually watching a player play the game, gauging the way the player swings a bat or throws a pitch, the motion, the way hitters react, the movement the ball has on a breaking ball, it really is a thing of beauty.
Introducing my gf to my parents is another matter. No matter how many times I describe what my gf is, how pretty she is, how she makes me laugh, how we get along, how fun our dates are, it just doesn't compare to actually having parents and gf meet sometime, to get a real gauge, get a face-to-face interaction, even to just allow each other to see the human element of this concept of a gf. That's a pretty significant step, a situation where just seeing someone (worth a thousand words!) also gets trumped (Trump, that's a loaded word nowadays for better or worse) by the aura of the symbolism of the moment, the acknowledgement that someone is real and not just a concept that parents have held for a long time, to recognize that the gf exists and make the relationship real, that is worth more than maybe a thousand pictures (that's a Bobby-ism!)
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
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