Shabda Media started as a response for people wanting to “see” things as pictures, rather than reading them as text. As the saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words”. Some of the ideas that are discussed in the Books and Blogs (such as inverted semantic trees, the tripartite nature of reality, the causality that proceeds by conflicts rather than consistency, etc.) evidently benefit from visual material. The danger of that visualization, however, is that one may treat these pictures as physical things, rather than as “mental models”. You are advised caution in this regard: Treat these pictures as mental models rather than physical structures. That doesn’t mean they are speculative or unreal. It means they are a way of thinking about reality, that can also be presented visually.
Over time, we found another group of people who were more interested in “listening” rather than “reading” or “viewing”. This seemed to run contrary to the previous need which required visual material because textual reading seemed hard. The contradiction is that you can pause your reading to think, but generally you do not pause audio. Therefore, if so many people were finding it hard to grasp the material in books, then it would be harder to grasp it via audio. But evidently, this is a mode in which people are now listening to books, blogs, and podcasts, and the medium continues to grow by leaps and bounds. We developed podcasts to meet this audience.
Then, there are many people who like to read, listen, and see — all at the same time. Clearly, that requires animated videos, with text, pictures, and audio, simultaneously. We have taken some steps in that direction.
The media content available on Shabda Media is not different from the content that is also available through Books, Blogs, or Forums. The difference is only that the content is pictures, audio, and video, rather than text.
The content on Shabda Media is produced by Ashish Dalela. It generally lags behind the textual content. While we want to progress simultaneously on all fronts, we are hampered by time. If you are interested in some specific questions, arising out of the content present here, feel free to reach us through Forums.