Generally, we can say: meaning is part of an object to the extent that it acts upon intelligence in a predictable way - Douglas R. Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach
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Which has a higher information density: a book or a movie? Or, to get at the heart of the question, if you were trying to convey as much as possible, which channel would you choose?

I think it’s easy to argue that plain-old text exploits very little of the bandwidth our cognitive equipment (our eyes and brain) has available, at least compared to richly colored moving pictures. In other words, it takes no stretch of the imagination to argue that a two-hour movie has more raw data in it than a 400-page book. You have all kinds of color and lighting information that updates at least twenty-four times a second; surely there’s more to that than your black-and-white, dead still, completely boring letters on a page.

So when we see book-to-movie adaptations, why do most of us feel as though something has been lost in the transition? Why do we have such a penchant for teaching quantum electrodynamics or East Asian history with books, when film is this incredibly rich medium? If a picture is worth a thousand words, why does the New York Times still have so much goddamn text?

We could argue that the people who make movies are just much less talented purveyors of their medium (which would explain the empty feeling I got after watching the Harry Potter films). But despite the fact that film has only been around for just over a century, given the relatively narrow band of human intelligence and talent I’d expect a fair number of exceptionally crafty filmmakers who are now just as good at what they do as most writers. Kurosawa is no Shakespeare, but I enjoyed Ran more than a lot of novels I’ve read. I think it would be foolish to blame the creators here. So what’s the problem? Why are films such limited vehicles for storing and transmitting information in spite of their enormous bitrate?

Compression.

Of course, I’m not talking about the MPEG-4 or DivX codecs that shrink video files for transmission. What I’m getting at is how the incredibly dense schema we call “language” enables huge swaths of data to be encoded in relatively short strings.

With this view, it is painfully clear how weak a case video has against well-formed text in conveying information. Indeed, most of the stuff you see in a movie is simply “noise”: objects in the background that are composed of millions of bits, sure, but which are essentially meaningless.

How exactly? Simply, most of the stuff you see in a movie has no isomorphic mapping to another idea or set of ideas. When you see a bunch of extras, for instance, you ignore them because they have no real significance. They just don’t evoke the kind of loopy, layered connections that are probably the key to our intelligence. In that sense, you don’t process most of the data in a movie.

The abstract connections you do make, like, “this pattern of colors = Matt Damon = Will Hunting = a confused genius with a history of physical abuse = …” are the ones that represent the intentions of the movie’s writers, director, etc. Likewise, cinematography boils down to “the way the camera moved/was positioned = the mood of the scene = nuances of dialogue and/or imagery”. The point is that these kinds of mappings are hindered - not enhanced - by the medium.

Now why are books better at evoking associations, or leveraging the idea of abstraction, than movies? For one, there are more words, and in a minute it will become clear why having words is really important. If you put a two-hour movie script into book form, it would come out to around 150 pages (there’s a rule of thumb in screenwriting that calls for one page per minute). But the more critical idea is somewhat more elusive.

When you see a picture of a triangle, that’s all you have: that particular triangle with its unique shape, size, color, and character. But the word “triangle” motivates a personal and essentially limitless graph of interpretations. Thus in processing the word “triangle,” your brain does a lot more work, I’d argue, than when you simply see one on a screen. The word lives on a higher level of abstraction, has more meat beneath it, than the picture.

That’s why people complain about the Harry Potter movies. Our imagined games of Quidditch might not have been in HD, but they were certainly richer - in terms of the variety and depth of the associations and pictures we made - than the ones we saw played out at the theater. The description of the “snitch” might have just been paragraph or two long, amounting to no more than a few thousand bits, but it did more for us than an entire scene of high-fidelity video with orders of magnitude more data. The difference is that words implicitly evoke more information in our brains as memories and imagined scenarios than the video does - a testament to the astounding power of language.

Language is the most efficient tool for conveying information because the shared ontology upon which it is built has thousands of years worth of associations. Words, and the relations among them, acquire vast meaning over time through continued use, allowing combinations that affect us at the core of our consciousness. I could draw a blob here which takes up more space, takes more CPU cycles to read, and contains more hard data than a word, but until that blob is seen and interpreted by a large number of people, it has no real meaning (especially when you define it as Hofstadter did above). We see the converse happen all the time: initially vapid words spread like viruses, and in so doing accumulate huge repositories of contextually relevant information; imagine telling someone thirty years ago to “google” something - you’d get strange looks - but now that word has snowballed into a set of associations - Google, Inc.; the Internet; google.com; searching; the archetypal 21st-century organization; etc.

Indeed, the Internet has enabled the compression process that inheres in language to happen faster. It takes less time for a new word to gather data; take “the long tail” or “web 2.0.” These phrases were only born within the past few years but, through repeated use, redefinition, and dissemination, have become powerful encapsulations of meaning - they evoke predictable reactions in those of us who are wise to their origin and conventional usage. It now takes less time to do that than ever before.

Perhaps the art of filmmaking could mature by acquiring its own language. In a sense it’s happened already through motif (for instance, a low-to-high camera angle is often used to give the illusion of “bigness” to characterize an actor as imposing). But dialogue remains for now the main vehicle for information in movies, and the added value of having someone interpret and act out this dialogue is still overshadowed by the sheer volume and complexity of the language in a book. Incredibly complex sentences would flop in a film because the audience wouldn’t have time to make the intended associations.

So for now, I’d put my money on plain-old text, though I did just download the film version of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and I’ve heard it’s as good as the book…

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