The Little World

A good question for scale modellers.

We used to have books and magazines to inform our modelling. Increasingly we turn to screens…sometimes to read, as you are doing now…but sometimes to watch an unknown person tell us how to do something or what to think about some subject.

The video proceeds at its own pace – the book can go at the speed of our comprehension. We can also refer back to the book a lot more readily; video backtracking sometimes throws the tablet or computer for a loop.

The other factor is the audio. For the YouTube presentation we hear the sound of the narrator. This might be a cultured or a rough voice, and there is a certain amount of prejudice against certain accents that can block our receptivity.

When we read we hear our own voice inside, and are a lot more inclined to pay attention and believe ourselves. That’s a reverse bias, but we all have it. If the printed message is wrong, it becomes right because we have read it.

I have yet to explore pure audio books. They would have less traction than videos while still taking up the same time for the presentation. And a spoken description of the assembly of a set of landing gear might be very much worse than either of the other two possibilities.

Imagine it with no diagram and a Middle European accent…