I am coming to appreciate how different forms of media are made differently and how each component of them has different jobs to do. For example if it is a blog, text has to carry all the weight and convey all the meaning. On the other hand if it is a video, narration has to do a bit and video and audio have to do a lot. And then the object and the creator of the media also have significant influence on how it will turn out. If the subject is a person who keeps talking better and better points as you prompt him and you are an interviewer, then maybe a video interview would be a great thing. But the same insights that you would derive from that would not have appeared if the subject had written a book on his own. Basically media is an engineered product that comes up because of a lot of processes, and not all processes lead to the same outcome. Different processes have different outcomes. And likewise in engineering you have different processes for different objectives. Like for some objects you would design them to be flexible and for some you design them to be hard. Otherwise you will end up with a stiff brittle bridge or a soft pen.

Why this revelation is important for me is because till now I had the impression that books are the best form of media that you can access. And if you want to get some information, go hit the books. But as I am growing I am appreciating the value of listening to the practitioners of the field. Sometimes hearing the practitioner’s talk is greater than any theory book you can get. And this practitioners cannot be bothered to write a book. Right it is not a format that they engage with so a lot of times documentaries and interviews can get a lot out of them than they would have ever could if they had just written a book.

Does it be up to your own goals of what you are seeking from media that should decide which medium you should consume. Books are not the default answer for knowledge. For some that might have been obvious but for me it was not. Maybe you don’t need to spend another $20 buying a book but just need to sit down and watch an interview of the author.

This whole thing became evident for me because in just three minutes I have expressed all this in this blog but I have been struggling to write a blog post for a company that I am working with in the tone they want. It is essentially because I have created a skeleton and I am trying to fill up that skeleton by fleshing it out with content but that’s not how I work. I go from one point to another and it is all generative. It is a random walk for me and skeletons are a predetermined destination. Now I am considering switching up how I write articles for them. Instead of creating skeletons first, I will write out everything I have and then maybe structure it or maybe I might not even need to do that.

Maybe sometimes for good content, prompts are necessary. That is why you need to pay attention to the subject and the creator. In the case of those blogs I am the creator and I need prompts so I shall produce them.

A book rewards someone who thinks in structured, sustained arguments. A podcast or interview rewards someone who thinks out loud, who gets sharper under pressure, who needs a conversational partner to draw out their best ideas. And one thing I realized about myself is that I am a writer who thrives on serendipity and the quality of prompts I receive. Those prompts can be my current thoughts or whatever media I’m seeing in front of me. So it would be wiser for me to take up assignments that are compatible with that serendipity and don’t have overwhelming structure.

And also I have a newfound appreciation for speeches, interviews, documentaries, and non-textual formats of media. Different formats extract different kinds of value

The written content has to face a lot more pressure; it has to be defensible. In the moment when you are talking with someone as a person, it is really hard to just knock someone off and say, “Hey, whatever you’re saying is bullshit.” You have a lot more authority when you’re talking than when you’re writing. You can get away with expressing your ideas way more freely when you’re speaking than when you are writing.

Of course it can be just opposite in some things, like you cannot talk about taboo subjects really openly in speech compared to writing. The personal presence affords you a lot more freedom when you are speaking.

And thus more non-systemic ways of writing work way better for someone like me who works by accumulation and surprises. That is, hey, I will write something; then a prompt will lead me to work in a completely different direction and I generate something. The accumulation of the current generated and whatever was generated in the past come together and another prompt elevates it to the next stage.

So the writing process for a person like me is a lot closer to jazz improvisation than recreating classical music. And I bet there is historical precedence of improvised jazz music later getting standardized to perform at other events or recorded to sell in CDs. So there is nothing to lose out if you are improvising on the beat instead of following a skeleton. You can always standardize it.

that media formats don't just deliver ideas differently, they generate different ideas 

The defensibility point is subtle and I think you're onto something real. Speech operates in a social context where interrupting someone feels rude, so ideas get more runway. Writing strips away that social protection — readers can pause, reread, object silently. This probably explains why oral cultures produced a lot of bold, sweeping ideas (philosophy, mythology, rhetoric) while written cultures trend toward hedged, footnoted arguments. The medium shapes not just the style of ideas but the risk tolerance of the thinker.

^from claude