Opinions diverge on whether it is more effective for those who wish to know more about foreign lives via visual records than text. I strongly agree with this perspective.
To begin with, text as a medium of communicating information is becoming increasingly obsolete. The most prominent attribution could be the fact that people’s attention span is getting shorter. This can be seen in many people’s proclivity for short-form content options on social media, stemming from the amount of false or unnecessary information on this platform. In addition to this tendency is the fact that a published work of any sort takes at least months, or even years to reach readers, at which point the information in it may not be relevant or accurate anymore, and videos can be better alternatives because they require a much less amount of time to be produced, edited, and posted. In other words, the modern landscape of media does not seem to be favourable for written works regarding learning new things in general.
Also, in the specific context of learning about other lives in the world, the advantages of videos are amplified. For example, culture – an abstract concept – can be best felt rather than read about, and video is a better approach to physically being in another country and experiencing how life is lived there. Furthermore, it can be difficult for one to comprehensively grasp the distinct aspects of life such as food, religion, customs, or traditional costumes by just reading, regardless of how vivid the description and illustrations are. Viewed from this angle, those who are simply interested in the life of a community or a place should opt to learn via visual documents, whether that be a professional production consisting of multiple seasons and episodes, or an amateur vlog that is under a minute duration posted on TikTok or Facebook.
In conclusion, I firmly believe that it is more beneficial and practical to learn about how other people in the world live through a visual graphic document rather than a written one. This is because of changes in people’s media diet as well as the superior benefits of video in capturing experiences.