We all do it. You open an app on your phone just to check one single thing, and suddenly its two hours later. You have watched fifty short videos of people making weird food, doing random dances, or ranting about a movie. You don’t even remember half of what you watched. Video is incredibly easy to consume. You just sit there and let the bright colors and loud noises wash over you. But have you ever felt totally exhausted and kind of empty after watching short videos for a long time?
Thats because visual media, especially the short stuff, is basically fast food for your brain. It tastes really good in the moment and gives you a quick spike of dopamine, but it doesn’t give you much actual nutrition. Your brain gets lazy because the video is doing all the work. Reading, on the other hand, is a completely different experience, and its alot more important for your brain than you might think.
The Power of Actually Reading
When you watch a video, everything is handed to you. The creator shows you what the place looks like, what the people sound like, and exactly how you are supposed to feel with background music. When you read something, your brain actually has to step up and do the heavy lifting. It has to take these weird little black shapes on a screen or a page and translate them into complex images, voices, and emotions.
This active process is exactly why reading builds your focus and makes you sharper. Think about whenever you watch a movie that was based on a book you read. People almost always say the book was better right? Thats because when you read, you are the director of the story. You decide what the characters look like and how the world feels. This stretches your imagination in a way that watching a screen never could of.
Another massive difference is pacing and control. With a video, the person who made it decides how fast the information comes at you. Usually its really fast, with lots of jump cuts and crazy edits to keep you hooked so you don’t scroll past them. Your brain is constantly racing to keep up. When you read an article, a story, or a book, you are entirely in the drivers seat. If you don’t understand a sentence, you can just stop and read it again. You can pause, look up at the ceiling, think about how the idea applies to your own life, and then keep going.
This makes reading way less stressful then trying to survive a barrage of flashy visuals. It lets you digest information at your own speed, which actually helps you remember it better. Instead of a short attention span trance, reading puts you into a state of deep focus.
How Platforms Control What You See
But the problem isn’t just that videos exist, its where we get them from. Social media and publishing platforms are designed in very specific ways to showcase content. Their main goal is usually to keep your eyes on the screen for as long as possible so they can show you more ads. Some platforms like YT, Insta just want you to mindlessly scroll forever, while others like Medium and Thoxt actually try to provide a space where you can learn something or read deeply.
It’s really important to understand how these different places operate so you know what you are getting into when you open the app. Lets look at how the big platforms compare to each other and their approaches.
| Platform | Main Medium | How it Showcases Content | Upsides | Downsides |
| Photos & Short Videos (Reels) | Highly aggressive algorithm pushing fast-paced Reels over photos. Focuses on visual aesthetic. | Great for seeing what friends are up to, finding fashion/art inspiration, very visually engaging. | Extremely addictive. Promotes unrealistic lifestyles. Reading captions is clunky and most people just skip the text entirely. | |
| Mixed (Text, Image, Video) | Shows a mix of groups, older family members posts, and random viral video feeds. | Good for local community groups, organizing events, and keeping up with relatives. | Can feel very cluttered. The video feed is often low quality clickbait. Not great for deep, focused reading. | |
| X (Twitter) | Short Text & Video | Chronological or algorithm feed of rapid-fire thoughts, news, and arguments. | The best place for real-time news and seeing global conversations as they happen. | Character limits make deep reading impossible. It rewards angry, extreme opinions because that gets more engagement. |
| Substack | Long-form Text (Newsletters) | Creators send articles directly to your email inbox or you read them on the app. | Zero algorithm distractions. You only see what you actually subscribed to. High quality reading. | Hard to discover new things unless someone links you to it. Can get expensive if you subscribe to alot of paid writers. |
| Medium | Long-form Text (Articles) | Recommends articles based on topics you follow like tech, psychology, or fiction. | Clean layout made specifically for reading. Easy to find deep dives into niche topics. | Behind a paywall for alot of the good stuff. Content quality can vary since anyone can publish. |
| Thoxt | Hybrid (Switchable Video to Long / Short form Text) | Uses video and article as an entry point, and allows seamless switching to written long-form content. | The watch feed is catchy with selectable options like video / news / reads and lets you control the pace by switching. | Its free and still a newer concept, but it’s getting popular among gen Z, esp among literary students. |
Anika Sachdev is a freelance writer, who writes about upcoming careers and academic studies. She is currently pursuing her diploma in Fashion Design from iNIFD. She enjoys writing, making illustrations and tracks AI technologies. Based in Mumbai, she likes to draw and listen to Bollywood music in her free time. For any questions, feedback or concerns, please email [email protected].