If Vlogs are a revolution then Blogs are poised to revolt. Words on paper and words that peer at you through the screen of a smartphone, a tablet, or a laptop have revolted and if you think the revolution fingered by videos is going to die, you need a rethink. The written words have no plan to leave us alone in the evil clutches of a clutter of videos. One reason why I write this is because my mind commands me to. Yes, come on, no one can adopt or forgo anything without express commands from the mind. The mind says, ‘Without words and their etymological boundaries, the world will be like a painting where every colour is running into the other until all that exists is meaninglessness undefined.’

Let me show you what the mind wants and does when reading and while watching a video. Even when I am watching a clown in some video clip do everything funny and am experiencing a series of laughter-invoking gigs there is one thing I try not to do. I try not to move my eyes away from the screen. Because the moment my eyes look elsewhere, the magic spell cast by the screen dies immediately. I have tried this many times and realized that videos or movies retain their effect only so long as the eyes are the bridge. Frankly, I must have watched hundreds of funny videos so far but the funniest act that I remember is the one that I read about in a book. I am, therefore, convinced that what I read stays longer than what I see or what I just hear.

The mind loves to imagine things on its own… at least mine does. But then I’m sure your mind too is equally adept at creating stories, filling in every possible blank in a narrative, suggesting alternatives when none seem possible, and imagining faster than the eyes are able to glide on a line of text. This is why whenever I am reading my mind is busy creating a horde of new stories that are linked to the one that I am reading but not really connected with it. Yes, the mind does all these funny things… but the moment you sit in front of a screen, any screen, it stops. It can either imagine or follow whatever is going on in the clip. When I was small I remember I followed a brilliant piece of tactical move that I discovered on my own whenever a horror bit or some unsavory scene or something utterly emotional one was about to happen on the screen. I tore my eyes away from the screen and peered down in the darkness where my feet were… or just looked sideways to watch the ‘exit’ sign that shone in a red light. This immediately took me away from the horror on the screen and made me feel calmer and more relaxed. Of course, I always eventually turned my head to see the rest of the movie but the point that is now fixed in my mind is that videos and films want total attention to survive in the memory.

Thus my argument is quite simple. Only reading stays. And reading titillates the mind and pushes it into the wonderful world of imagination. And then as a reader I am free to imagine in as much detail as I wish to… but a video or a movie runs too fast and there is never any time to savour a moment. No time to allow the mind to stand up and applaud or quietly open a personal notebook to jot down a few words, a few sentences, or an observation. If you have not read Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, try this opening sentence. Read it slowly and then feel the words dance inside your mouth. Unforgettable experience. Videos, I’m sure cannot replicate this.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

Those who feel that #WritingIsDoomed and that videos are busy digging a massive grave for all the words written so far, are not imagining the future correctly. Reading, whether it is on a printed paper, a book, a newspaper, or on a blog online is still having the power to sway the mind in unimaginable ways. You see, I love reading even news as compared to watching it on the small screen simply because an anchor rattling off a series of statistics and facts are competing and consistently losing out to the moving images that complement the text. When I read I focus on each fact and figure and give it enough time to embed itself in my memory. The difference is obvious.

Problems with the choices today

It isn’t that all is well with the written word. There are umpteen blogs where the blogger mixes a loss with lose, a dose with his doze, misplaces there with their, and is in the woods riding verbs that don’t move and chasing nouns that do not exist. The reader has no choice but to accelerate to the next option available these days… the video.

These readers choose to avoid blogs and run off towards video channels on YouTube, spend time clicking on FB live or Insta clips… without realizing that the set of people here too is no less a creativity convict. There are hundreds of videos where the content communicates nothing. Any person who cannot set right his train of thoughts while writing a passage cannot possibly do so when the time comes for him to get up and communicate through the spoken word. Even if you have watched the video on the Kanwariya hooliganism in Delhi, you will know nothing more than the petty act that could anyway have been conveyed through a set of stills. The text with a few pictures would ready a more actionable population because then the mind imagines such acts of arson in myriad ways and starts formulating a sane opinion. Videos, on the other hand, result in impulsive stands and an immediate rush of emotions that can be harmful.

Videos too have a role to play. They are, however, like the guests at a wedding and help in all sorts of positive affirmations that a new relationship demands from the society. The memory of these guests is invariably accompanied with their observations, snippets of advice, fun stories from the past, warnings about expected and unexpected pitfalls, and an entire cache of wordless emotions popping out as live motion. I believe that words have a large heart and have already welcomed pictures and videos to tag along to create new adventures for the reading population. This is why I respect words so much. They have hardly ever complained of constricted space and their unwillingness to share a life with other forms of creative input. Why then must videos assume that they can walk to end of existence without the written word? They cannot. Words are not doomed. Words are intelligent enough to accept new partners. Words live because only words can effectively create bridges between truth, fiction, the real fiction and our mind. The written word does this best. #WritingWillSurvive

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Blogs vs Vlogs. indispire topic. #WritingWillSurvive

Blogs vs Vlogs. indispire topic. #WritingWillSurvive

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Arvind Passey
13 August 2018