Dhruvik Parikh

Reading vs. Watching

Last year, I got back into reading consistently for the first time since high school. It started with an accountability bet with my roommate, and quickly became self-sustaining, as audiobooks replaced podcasts and music during my commute, and reading became my bedtime ritual. What was particularly interesting during this transition was that I found myself watching way less TV and YouTube, instead swapping that time for reading fiction and non-fiction, respectively.

Most would agree that reading is a better use of time than watching TV or YouTube, or at least that it feels like a better use of time. It definitely does to me. But why is that? What’s the material difference between reading fiction and watching a TV drama that makes the former so much more intellectually respected? Both take comparable amounts of time, convey similar messages, and are immersive experiences in their own rights.

Let's set aside the whole “the book is always better than the movie” topic. There are separate and fairly obvious reasons why the original content is better than the reproduction, especially if the reproduction is as budget and time-bound as a feature film. It’s also obvious that film and literature play with different art forms, film can show you visuals that the author could not possibly convey in text, and text can convey wordplay and feelings that cannot reliably be conveyed in film. These aren't the differences I want to highlight here.

While reading, it occurred to me. Not to get too meta here, but the fact that I was having thoughts while reading a book is the observation in and of itself. While watching a TV show, movie, or YouTube video, you’re so immersed in the content, with its perfectly engineered picture design, dramatic pacing, and even immersive music. But with a book, you’re pretty much on your own. You have to create your own picture design in your mind, you have to set your own dramatic pacing (to some extent) and come up with your own soundtrack and voices. This additional effort required to read a book makes it so that your brain is working harder while reading than while watching something. When your brain is activated and firing off synapses healthily, you are more capable of forming and entertaining additional thoughts, whether they are related or unrelated to the content.

Not only are you having more thoughts while reading, but the form factor of a book makes it much easier to actually give these thoughts the time of day. Surely, you could pause a video to think, but how often do we really do that? But we all know the feeling of pausing while reading to think about something and then finding your place on the page again. Many of us even highlight and annotate as we read, but who annotates a YouTube video?

I listen to audiobooks a lot, because I have a 45+ minute commute and love the way audiobooks balance your attention between careful driving and listening/thinking. But on the spectrum of fully immersive “VR” to simple text on a piece of paper, audiobooks are perhaps closer to the middle, near movies, than they are to paper books. It’s actually a major difference that the narrator voices the characters for you and sets the pacing. All you do on your own is visualize. It's also hard to entertain other thoughts during an audiobook without drifting away and losing your place. So as much as I love audiobooks, I think they are probably closer to "video-less movies" than they are "voiced books".

So I think that’s why reading is so powerful. It really is the best way to take in content that you want to engage deeply with. Sure, if you just want the overview or themes you could watch a video summary and get it done the fastest, but to really engage, and be truly immersed in the world, there is nothing better than reading.