#92: Not Here to Learn
I’ve never listened to a podcast at 1.5x or 2x speed. I might eventually, but I know why I haven’t so far: because, unlike certain kinds of reading, there’s no reason for me to get through podcasts any faster. I listen to podcasts the way I listen to sports talk radio—as a pleasant stream of voices that fills the background when I’ve got a background that needs filling. I can tune in and tune out without missing something important and getting lost (this isn't to say I don't ever pay close attention). The texture, the humor, and the sounds of the voices all matter more to me than the information the podcast is transmitting to me, and speeding it up would ruin those. Podcasts are low on informational density and thus a terrible way to transmit it; even the more “educational" episodes could compress their true teachings into a bulleted article that would take five minutes to read. So listening to a podcast at a multiple of its intended speed goes against the grain of the medium, which is better suited to soothe, comfort, entertain, or saturate the environment than to impart knowledge.
It's probably not that simple though. I don’t imagine that many of us are really blasting through podcasts out of a simple thirst for information. A more likely possibility is that 1.5x listening is a response to the content overload problem—the internet is not only delivering too many podcasts, posts, and articles to us, but it’s also giving us tools to capture and collect them too effectively, like Instapaper (TV used to flow past us indifferently, now we find ourselves “behind" on shows). This forces us to come up with our own system for sorting everything out, and the default system is to mainline everything as rapidly as it comes in, enjoyment be damned. Speed reading is more appealing than ever. The internet seems to reframe a lot of media as mechanisms for pure information delivery, which makes sense, because information is the only thing a computer knows. If we internalize the idea that we’re online to consume that information—to learn—then the faster we can process content, the more enriched we will supposedly be.
In this sense, using computers makes us act more like computers. As far as I know, Spotify doesn’t give me the option to listen to music at 1.5x, but, as absurd as that possibility sounds, I can imagine something like it happening. There are blog posts about watching Netflix at 1.1x speed, “saving yourself about six minutes for every hour of binge watching.” It’s hard to think of music as a conveyor of compressible information but it can be forced into other narrow roles: Liz Pelly has described Spotify's quest to isolate songs' emotional and functional essences and build playlists around specific objectives like chilling out or exercising. Similarly, Matt Zoller Seitz, commemorating the conclusion of both Game of Thrones and The Avengers, suggested that film and television will soon blur into an "endless, insatiable content stream" that doesn't distinguish between art forms. After all, that's what the internet does: It separates the fungible informational component of the world from its more ambiguous (but still valuable) context, distilling the former into equally fungible "content" and leaving the latter somewhere we won't be able to find it.
Reads:
How a mapping mistake enabled Under Armour's billionaire CEO to claim a massive tax break for a Baltimore real estate development. The 0.001-square-mile overlap between two GIS shapefiles underneath a freeway overpass has never seemed so dramatic.
The 3 Pictures that Explain Everything About Smart Cities. "The smart city isn’t a technological utopia, or an environmental lifeboat. It’s a few PowerPoint slides in a conference room demonstrating that there’s money to be made."
A thread about how technology is eroding something that has broadly existed for most of human history: the ability to move around the physical world anonymously. "Society runs on the assumption that people are unknowable in some spaces."