I'm honestly not sure it's a generational divide, so much as groups of people with different issues and preferences divide.
Like, I don't actually mind watching videos if I know what the video is about and I want to watch it and I have the time to do so. If a friend sends me a video and describes it, I can then watch the video if it appeals to me.
But I have a hard time processing audio and visual at the same time. It's why I watch EVERYTHING with subtitles, because it's the only way I'll be able to understand everything. And a LOT, dare I say MOST, videos people make either don't have captions, or the captions are "auto" added by some kind of algorithm, and aren't correct. I'm 100% guilty of this! But most of my videos are cute animal videos that don't have audio words that matter. It's different when it's, like, an instructional video that is trying to explain something, and I need to know what's going on and the only way to do that is to watch/listen at the same time.
I also don't have a huge amount of spare time that I'm not doing or supposed to be doing or about to be doing something else in. I don't scroll algorithmic content out of boredom. I don't trawl the internet for videos. I follow like 30 accounts on tumblr, and at least a third of them are secondary accounts for the others, and some of them literally post maybe once a month, some less. That's all I have time for keeping track of. Most of the 'stuff I'm doing online' is research or learning, and I want to be able to skim to see what's there, to know if it is going to be worth my time to slow down and carefully read. With how search results are these days, half the links I click are garbage and a quick scan of the page can mean a huge difference in wasted time. I can't quick scan a video to find out if I'm about to waste the next 10 minutes of my life watching it through or not, I just have to waste the time and be mad about it after. And instead of doing that, I will simply not watch the video.
With videos, sure there are some things that are better or only able to be shown properly on video (a good example, I think, would be something like learning sign language... actually seeing someone do the motions is way easier than reading text describing hand motions. I've done instructional videos on how to ear tag mice and how to gavage feed peafowl and how to clip a chicken's beak, where describing the motions may not necessarily make sense.... but in those cases having a text description AND the video is still best). But if it's something that doesn't NEED to be a video-only thing, but someone made it a video, and I don't understand something, then I'm stuck rewinding over and over again, trying to get to the right spot. And "rewind" functions on internet videos are atrocious, if you've ever tried to use them there's no precision to it. So if (WHEN) I rewind a few seconds too far back, my brain immediately goes "whoops too far we know this part skip it" and half the time only tunes back to focus after what I needed to hear already passed. Which means i miss it. Again. And again. and again. And then I get frustrated at having to deal with a video. If it was just fucking WORDS on the PAGE, I could re-read it until I get it.
And that kind of experience isn't necessarily generational. It's probably /correlated/ because folks my age and older didn't grow up with endless video feeds from around the world. Instructions were printed where we could read them so that's how our brains got wired to absorb info. But someone with audio processing issues like me, or that is deaf/HoH, isn't necessarily old. Someone that is blind or has tracking issues or attention issues or can't read or whatever that makes watching videos easier for them isn't necessarily young. And people with just general preferences can fall into any generation.
So like YEAH there are things that work better as videos, or that really do need video. But if it's the equivalent of a work meeting that could have been an e-mail, then yeah, I just want the e-mail.
