When I was young, information was scarce abd it took day/weeks to access it - so the skill was to take time extracting as much information as possible from the few available sources.
Now the problem is
exactly the reverse: information is so common that the necessary skill is quickly determining what
not to look at. Video is very effective at preventing that.
Two other real disadvantages of video:
- video isn't searchable for keywords; if you can't find something it might as well not exist
- I speed read text to quickly determine whether an article is worth reading in detail; since searches are imperfect, most aren't relevant. You can't speedview videos, so it takes at least 10* more of my little remaining life to determine that it isn't interesting. Bad tradeoff, but I wouldn't expect a youngster to have that perspective!
In fairness, to an extent, you are right. But with a change of methods and acceptance that it is not as easily or reliably searched through, as a decent text article, you can do those things with videos. To a degree, but not to 100% effectiveness, as with text.
Nothing, including text, is 100% effective
I'll ignore searches with specific answers such as "what are the microwave x-band frequencies?", since the first result is probably sufficient - even without clicking the link.
Many of my searches are for topics that are sufficiently complex or abstruse that there is often only, say, one potentially useful result per page.
The alternative to speed reading, is to read the title and speed read the descriptive text (if filled in), just below the video on youtube and/or to jump at various time positions and watch a few seconds of the video at 5 mins, 10 mins, 15 mins etc (use common sense to determine where to click on the time line).
Yebbut that takes 10* as long. You have to wait for the video to load, then figure out the context at that point in the video, then guess what night or might not be in the gaps...
OTOH, I'm a fast reader.
As an exercise, take one of the EEVBlog videos and deliberately ignore the table of contents - because most vloggers aren't that considerate of their audience. Pretend that you have stumbled upon "EEVblog #1013 – Mailbag" because you were searching for "2DW233 Voltage Reference Zener".
How long does it take to find that part of the video, and to determine whether or not it helps you?
Text is an order of magnitude faster.
EDIT: I've just tried it. It took ~4 mins to find the start of that segment, then ~3 mins watching it (which is much shorter than most videos). That's ~7 minutes of my remaining life I'll never get back.
If it had been text then it would have take 30s to find out that it is marginally interesting. Bad tradeoff.
You can still partially text search or keyword search on it, by hoping that someone, somewhere has commented on it, in a blog or similar.
Ah, the AltaVista/Yahoo! model of curated directories of links. Not scalable, as was obvious back in 1995 before google was even a .edu.
One acceptable, workable alternative is the "table of contents"
with times below the video in the EEVBlog videos. But that is very rare