On summaries and re-consumption
Nikhil has written about the detriments of the increasing demand for tldr, from AI summaries for example or the addition of increased playback speeds on Youtube, podcasts or audiobooks. I would add something like Blinklist as a prime example of this phenomena, which baffled me when I saw it the first time. As Nikhil puts it:
If you think you can extract 100% of the books with a 5-15mins summary, you donât understand reading at all. Itâs a very bad way to reduce your attention span even further than it already is. All of these ai summary services convince you that you need to be on top of things. Consume it all. With a focus on quantity. And that is not good for you. Your focus should be on the quality of the consumption.
I can relate to the feeling of wanting to consume more than I have time for. I havenât retorted to summaries of books, but I have tried learning speed reading techniques and used increased playback speed on audiobooks. And I am also sometimes guilty of skim reading news articles.
It is a bad habit and it has likely impacted my attention span and general ability to focus on things for longer periods of time. What I find somewhat funny here is that the apparent need for AI summaries comes from a trend that AI generated text help fuelââthe fact that many texts have gotten overly verbose. AI is really âgoodâ at being very verbose, which probably comes from all the texts it has gobbled up have also been written in that style. Succinct writing is a rare thing and way too many articles (and blog posts, like this one probably) are longer than they need to.
We can now apply AI-assisted writing to our emails only for the receiver to use an AI summarizer for their inbox.
Going back to Blinkist, in some ways I can understand why that exists. It seems to be very popular for self-help and business books, and for the few of those I have encountered, they have all been extremely padded to fill up the pages, where the gist of their message could easily be summarized into a fifth of their length.
What really got me thinking with Nikhilâs post however, was what he says about re-consumption:
Remember that TV series or movie that you are watching for the 100th time? Yet, you learned something new from it still. A new angle, understood that joke you didnât before or that reference. Thatâs cos you are not the same person who saw it last time. You grew up. You learned things. Your experience and wisdom has improved.
It is impossible to disagree here, though it is tough for me to follow in practice. I watch close to a movie every day, and I prioritize watching movies I havenât seen before. I would rather expanding my knowledge and horizons with new experiences, than revisit old ones. But when I do re-watch something, especially when it has been 10 years or more since I last saw it, and it is practically a whole new experience. With both my general film knowledge has improved and just how much has happened for me personally in the last 10 years (two kids, new job, house).
Last year 11% of my film watching was re-watches, though this year it is currently about half. I think about 1 in 10 is a good ratio to aim for, so I feel inclined to add some re-watches to my schedule soon.