Books capture the zeitgeist in a way videos rarely do

My dear students

One day many years ago, I completed a class on Aristotle’s political philosophy and was about to return to my office when a student accosted me. “Sir”, he said, “I liked your class but I wanted to know if you could share some videos with us”. I was new to this line of thinking, so when I asked for an explanation, he replied that videos explaining Aristotle’s philosophy would have been useful in his learning.

I was a bit flabbergasted. Learning Aristotle through a video? I told the student I can’t recommend any videos on Aristotle. He should read the text of the ‘Nicomachean Ethics’ as closely as possible. I thought about this incident recently when I was desperately searching for online videos to know more about crypto currencies. I had been reduced to foraging for videos because I could not find any accessible text in print.

Instead, I found several terrific videos that explained the ideas clearly and precisely. My experience with learning about crypto was a sobering experience. I no longer scoff at videos as an instructional tool. Just to be clear, I have never scoffed at video as a mode of entertainment. I always tell my students, alas to little effect, that ‘The Wire’ (released two decades ago) is probably the best cultural product to come out of the USA, never mind that it’s a TV show. It’s portrayals of American law and order, media, education and labourusing Baltimore as the pivot are both riveting and revealing. Video brings an immediacy and vividness to entertainment that other mediums can rarely match.

But beyond entertainment and targeted instruction (like the crypto videos), I continue to believe that video has its limitations when compared to the written word. Books capture the zeitgeist in a way videos rarely do.

Last week, I was reading ‘If then’ by Jill Lepore. It’s a book about the history of something we all hear about on a daily basis but know very little about: data science. In the 50s and the 60s, a corporation called Simulmatics pioneered the art of predicting human behaviour using the science of data analysis. Being deficient both in data and science, it was a spectacular failure. I thought Jill Lepore will say something about the failure being instructive but there is no such thing in the book.

It’s a narrative of failure, not a harbinger of things to come. Yet, because it’s a well-researched book, it took me, as videos rarely do, on a voyage of discovery. Data science was almost beside the point. I learnt interesting stuff about the personalities and issues of post Second World War America. I learnt about Adlai Stevenson, Presidential aspirant, who was hopeless at being a politician but great at being a speechwriter. I learnt about Saul Bellow, the writer. I read about the Cuban crisis and the Kennedy administration. I chanced upon a statement that described the effect of JFK’s assassination on the American public. When John F Kennedy died, it looked to ordinary Americans that the world would not be the same again: ‘And the waves lapped the shore, and the sun shone, and everything was the same, except it wasn’t.’

Books enable us to construct the world we are reading about in ways that are unique to us. The characters speak in voices that we provide. The tone, the texture, the emotional registers, the local colour, the sounds, the smells, the atmosphere, while not of our making, are ours to mark, with our personalities and our imaginations. Videos can never come close to such an immersive experience where we are active collaborators in the world that someone else has created.

As videos occupy more of our time, we will lose our ability to absorb knowledge, trivial and epochal, in the wide-ranging, non-purposive way that books can provide. If we don’t let phrases and aphorisms marinate in our minds, our articulation of our imagination will be diminished. Videos will always be diverting, and diversion is important in the aggravating lives that we lead. But we don’t want to go through this world being diverted. We want to nurture a sense of curiosity and wonder. We want art that gently pushes us to expand our minds, that makes us think even when we would rather not. Videos can bedazzle us but sometimes we would rather be beguiled. I hope you will remember this as you navigate your lives in schools and universities.