Powerusers turn off the images on their browsers to speed up their searching time since its the textual information that will usually most benefit them. This awareness has to be taught. What people need is not always what people think they want. Email alone, without some type of group conferencing plan to allow people to come together easily online, falls short of the potential for true community networking. Interactive reading and writing is a completely new medium, yet to be recognized for its true inherent social and communications potential.
Words are block sculptures of reality, and writing is fundamentally a thinking process.
We retain twice as much of what we read compared to what we hear or see. The words of great men and women have endured throughout history. Reading a great book can make images and people live within us in a way more uniquely personal than movies or television, though many of us have never fully experienced this. We can today automatically search volumes of text for specific phrases, in seconds. The written word has many powerful advantages over video information which are today not well recognized due to our cultural bias toward video and our low literacy levels.