# always bet on text ![rw-book-cover](https://readwise-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/static/images/article2.74d541386bbf.png) ## Metadata - Author: [[Base style]] - Full Title: always bet on text - Category: #articles - URL: https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html ## Highlights - text is the most powerful, useful, effective communication technology ever, period. - Text is the most flexible communication technology. - Text can convey ideas with a precisely controlled level of ambiguity and precision, implied context and elaborated content, unmatched by anything else. It is not a coincidence that all of literature and poetry, history and philosophy, mathematics, logic, programming and engineering rely on textual encodings for their ideas. - The breadth, scale and depth of ways people use text is unmatched by anything. - Tags: [[writing]] [[text]] - There is no equivalent in any other communication technology for the social, communicative, cognitive and reflective complexity of a library full of books or an internet full of postings. Nothing else comes close. - So this is my stance on text: always pick text first. As my old boss might have said: always bet on text. If you can use text for something, use it. It will very seldom let you down.