If Instagram is a picture, Facebook is text. If Instagram is television, Facebook is a book. But it’s easy to have the question, “So what?” but the difference between the two and the influence they have is tremendous.
Let’s imagine the eyes of someone watching television. Dozens of images appear in succession per second. The eyes reflexively follow the differences between the pictures, that is, “movement.” One can consciously fix one’s gaze on a stationary place on the screen for a while, but even that is in vain when the scene changes and different places and different people appear. Throughout watching television, the human eye merely reacts. In other words, it is “dragged along.”
The eyes of someone looking at text (a book) do not move unless they intentionally move. Not a single letter moves forward. “Willpower” is needed to read letters, words, and sentences. Like some kind of mental weight training, one cannot finish even one book in a lifetime by simply looking at it unless one constantly takes one step forward. No matter how strange the book or the author writes, unless one actively reads it by one’s own choice, that strange sound cannot exert any influence on me. In that respect, the initiative of text is not with the author but with the reader. No matter how good an author’s work is, it only has value if the reader chooses to read it with free will.
While looking at images, the human brain uses almost entirely the part allocated to vision. If sound is added to it as the image moves, the brain area in charge of hearing is additionally activated. But it is only passively accepting senses. It receives images as they are seen and sounds as they are heard. And then it moves them to the warehouse of memory and keeps them precious for a lifetime. Even if you cannot remember the scene or sound, it remains somewhere in the brain. (And it suddenly comes to mind at the moment when you should least remember that scene or sound.)
The act of reading text basically requires the simultaneous use of both the visual and auditory parts of the brain. It is relatively recent in human history that humans, who had lived in an oral culture for a long time, began to use letters. Stories that were heard by word of mouth were stored and transmitted in writing. So, the act of reading automatically uses the auditory part of the brain to interpret meaning. At the same time, it performs the complex task of actively imagining, drawing, combining, and modifying the scenes contained in the text.
If the brain of a person who reads text is an animal, the brain of a person who watches pictures or videos is a plant. There is almost no active movement, and it is mainly passive reaction. Occasionally, they may react to a specific image and attempt to think, but even that disappears like smoke and evaporates like steam when the scene changes.
It is as clear as day what the difference will be between the brains of someone who has only used Instagram for 10 years and someone who has only used Facebook (mainly text) for 10 years.
Of course, we cannot simply praise Facebook as being good. It is much better for mental health than using Instagram because it has a higher proportion of text-heavy posts among social media, but the disadvantage of thought fragmentation still exists.
In the case of books, the writer or author also spends a long time writing, and the reader also spends a relatively long time and will reading and thinking. A well-written book deals with thoughts on the subject from various angles in three dimensions, and with a beginning, middle, and end. It has “depth and breadth.”
However, in the case of social media, the connection between posts is not required. It is the opposite of how the chapters of a book are connected. What if the first chapter of a book talked about a tragic event in which many lives were sacrificed, and then the next chapter suddenly delved into how delicious fried chicken is? The author or the publishing house’s editorial department would be considered crazy. But it is not at all strange to do that in social media posts.
So, on Facebook, even with relatively long posts, both the writer and the reader tend to stop thinking halfway. Thoughts are fragmented and scattered. But even that is much better than Twitter, which is optimized for exchanging jokes with mainly short sentences, or Instagram, where they barely think at all.
Modern people mistakenly believe that they are the smartest generation in history, but they are not at all. In Lincoln’s era, public speeches and debates by American politicians usually lasted for 7 hours, and each speech was at least 30 minutes long. The contents of the speeches were moderately long and well-written literary sentences that could be published as books as they were. Because people of that era had only books and newspapers as means of accessing information, they had no problem understanding such long discussions. But today, if you play the sentences used in public speeches and debates at that time to people, the majority of people cannot understand even a few sentences. They only understand when it is explained in detail and in colloquial language as if to an elementary school student.
Modern people may belong to the most foolish generation in history since the invention of writing. If you hold a microphone to them and ask about a certain problem, or if you give them paper and ask them to write, nothing comes out except what they saw on television. It would be fortunate if it stopped at social or political problems, but the decisive problem is that human thinking is a concept organically connected to all fields, like brain nerves, so the same ability is inevitably exerted in the thought process of making important choices in their own lives.
If people in the past, before television existed, chose and read various books according to their own choices, developing knowledge and thinking skills based on that, these days, people live as television tells them to. They also live based on advice from others thanks to the development of communication technology, but that advice mostly originates from television. In the end, we are living in an era where everyone except those who deliberately seek out and read text (books) can only become NPCs (Non-Player Characters, characters that the player cannot directly control in a game). No matter how witty you are with words, if the content does not escape television news or current affairs programs, you belong to the NPC. If you want to avoid being an NPC, you have no choice but to stay away from television and Instagram and read text and read books to limit the passivity of the brain and improve activity.
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