Journalist and broadcaster Andrew Marr has warned against a culture that could become too reliant on audio and visual information online, according to Press Gazette.

Addressing the London College of Communication for this year's Hugh Cudlipp lecture, Mr Marr related the popularity of image-based material to pre-Enlightenment culture.

"So long as we are able to consume infomation through words - are able to re-read, check exact quotation, pore over figures and statistics and carefully chosen descriptions - then we, the public, will still have some purchase or grip, and therefore power."

He said that journalists should champion good writing over 'the triumph of image'.

Responding on his blog, the Guardian's director of digital publishing Simon Waldman added that audio visual content is vastly outweighed by text online, and that broadcasters have actually been forced to return to text journalism for the web.

"In addition to this, blogging is perhaps the greatest explosion in text in the last century. Not all of it, of course, particularly erudite. But at it’s heart is textual analysis and debate," he writes.

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