Text is mightiest; but you should use "video" instead of "image". Video is the natural visual medium to convey an essay, not a still image.
Let's consider a philosophical essay as something highly abstract, then its video counterpart would be mostly audio (transcript of the essay). In other cases, e.g. a scientific report, video might be easier content to consume but producing a proper video for that take much more time than writing a 6-page text. The video as the visual medium counterpart has lot more complexity and not always worth it.
Consider a presentation: text+visual+audio, it's more capable to convey the essence of the material. So all these boils down to what is the perfect combination for a particular use case. From short to long image/video, from Instagram, TikTok to YouTube, each multimedia choice lead to different use cases.
And text is the mightiest not because that it necessarily convey better, but because it can:
1. produced/maintained/transferred with the least complexity than others, it's much more efficient representation in this regard.
2. It can represent with most rigorous detail (e.g. consider a math paper)
3. It has the easiest retrieval and mining
4. BUT It usually needs more effort to consume
It's always nice to choose the proper combination of text+visual+audio+interaction. AR/VR only add one ingredient (if you consider it a new one) to this whole toolbox we as humankind are building. It makes our communication much more complex, and much more powerful. However, at the end, the most basic one which is text will remain the mightiest. We may need to wait for some bizarre telepathy technology between brains to change the status quo.
Let's consider a philosophical essay as something highly abstract, then its video counterpart would be mostly audio (transcript of the essay). In other cases, e.g. a scientific report, video might be easier content to consume but producing a proper video for that take much more time than writing a 6-page text. The video as the visual medium counterpart has lot more complexity and not always worth it.
Consider a presentation: text+visual+audio, it's more capable to convey the essence of the material. So all these boils down to what is the perfect combination for a particular use case. From short to long image/video, from Instagram, TikTok to YouTube, each multimedia choice lead to different use cases.
And text is the mightiest not because that it necessarily convey better, but because it can:
1. produced/maintained/transferred with the least complexity than others, it's much more efficient representation in this regard.
2. It can represent with most rigorous detail (e.g. consider a math paper)
3. It has the easiest retrieval and mining
4. BUT It usually needs more effort to consume
It's always nice to choose the proper combination of text+visual+audio+interaction. AR/VR only add one ingredient (if you consider it a new one) to this whole toolbox we as humankind are building. It makes our communication much more complex, and much more powerful. However, at the end, the most basic one which is text will remain the mightiest. We may need to wait for some bizarre telepathy technology between brains to change the status quo.