Bibliophobia (n.)
A fear of reading and/or writing, esp. pertaining to "longer" texts (more than one short paragraph).
I just did a Google search for instructions on how to connect one device to another using two wires. The information would have been adequately conveyed by one still image accompanied by a couple of sentences of text. Sadly, no such document turned up in the search.
Instead, I found several competing video "tutorials" on YouTube, each taking several minutes of slow exposition to "show and tell" the process of wiring up the connection as they did it in real time. Some were unable to speak intelligibly, or showed video footage of schematics that were too blurred to be legible. Others spoke a language I did not understand, and some were either doing it wrong, using different hardware than mine, or explaining something else entirely.
What the flying fuck is happening to people? Do they no longer know how to read and write? And do they no longer look for existing documentation before they make their own bad version of it?
Instead of taking one glance at written and illustrated documentation from a reliable source, and then doing the work myself in seconds, I am expected to hope for a random person on YouTube to know how to do it right, spend fifteen minutes watching that person do it slowly, taking notes or screenshots from key moments in the video, and then do it myself? This is a waste of my time and an insult to my intelligence. If this is the way we are heading with the "information society", we are in for a dark age. Functional illiteracy breeds ignorance, stifles creativity and puts a strong damper on dissemination of ideas.
Learn to read. Write things down. Yes, some things are better explained by a video, but please, please, keep in mind that an "old school" document (with schematic illustrations and/or photos) is faster to produce, faster to consume, much less data intensive, indexable and in most respects more accessible than a video.
This goes not only for instructions on how to build things IRL, but for programming and other computer related tasks. Yes, people try to explain programming, or editing a single line in a text file, by posting a blurry video of a screen capture instead of just writing the information down.
The written word is the foundation of our civilization. If we abandon it, our civilization goes out the window with it, and we are in for an era with millions of ignorant me-too vloggers who never rise above the level of beginners but proudly publish nearly identical, badly produced videos to display their ability to copy someone else's work.
Sigh.
