Speed Listening
I love to read
and surf the Net. But I don’t like listening to people talk on videos (except
TED talks): it’s just too slow; and while I can move the scroll bar to a
different point of the video, I really don’t know what I missed. At least with
texts, I can glance at words/phrases even while I skip parts.
With so much
information on the Net, speed reading became popular: there are techniques on
speed reading; and even apps that do it for you!
Ok, you probably
knew all that already. But Ashlee Vance wasn’t prepared for what a reader of
his book told him:
“LOVED the book. Listened to it on
Audible at 2x speed and finished it in three days. Couldn't put it down.
Congrats!”
Vance, who had
done all the things that all authors do: “slowly crafting narratives,
painstakingly choosing words, deliberating over the lengths and tones and
rhythms of sentences”, was shocked:
“It had never occurred to me that people
might listen to the book at 2x speed in order to ingest the information at a
quicker rate. But here was proof that such things occur.”
“Speed-listening”
is the term for it. Or as Vance describes it:
“This struck me as such a Silicon Valley
thing to do. Hook your brain to the machine and download at the best transfer
rate available.”
Megan
Garber calls it “chipmunked feedback”:
“It suggests that a book exists not
primarily for pleasure, but rather for being sucked of its precious information
as efficiently as possible. It suggests that digital advances can help make an
extremely old activity—reading—newly transactional.”
And it turns out
blind speed-listening at 1.5X or 2X speeds may already be ancient history!
There are already things like SmartSpeed:
“Smart Speed isn’t about simply playing
audio content at 150 or 200 percent of the standard rate; it instead tries to
remove, algorithmically, the extraneous things that can bulk up the play time
of audio content: dead air, pauses between sentences, intros and outros, that
kind of thing.”
While some of
the benefits may be worth it, as Garber says:
“It also removes the silence that can, in
context, be meaningful in and of itself.”
Arthur
Schopenhauer once said, “It would be a good thing to buy books if one could
also buy the time to read them”. Since we couldn’t buy time, we seem to have
gone with speed reading first; and now to speed listening.
Looks like we have come a long way! Possibly a short way, considering between "my time" and present digital era, hardly a few generations have passed.
ReplyDeleteIn our time, during the school or college years, we had to study slowing and patiently, to grasp details . Later, learning to keep abreast of our work situation or knowledge gathering at home too, we did set ourselves a reasonable pace only. Today such luxury is unthinkable, since we have built a world of unending luxuries for ourselves, so that we have no time for any luxury. :-)
Since even computer aided 2X reading is a thing of past, we belong tentatively to the SmartSpeed reading/listening era. So you say. With computers shortly advancing to light speed and with brain implants to make our comprehension set at a nominal 64X speed, there can be no doubt heaven is about to descend! :-) Engineering graduation is likely to be compressed to 4 days instead of 4 years of study, in the years to come surely! No need to say the same applies for other fields too.
In the mean time, I am having difficulty with conveying anything to anyone who belong to this super-fast digital age. These high-speed people switch off half-way through my paragraphs if I am lucky, or, half-way through my sentences if they are lucky! They are already immersed in, "I should fill in the visa form tonight itself", followed by, "Why Krish has not informed me when he will file my tax return?" By the time, the listener comes alive to listen to where I left off and eagerly wait for the end of listener's reverie, his/her mobile rings. After that, usually one word should suffice, "Amen!" and start doing my own work.
So, Vijay, can you identify those apps and brain implants that would help me convey what I have to convey - a detail which normally takes 5 minutes - in less than 500 micro-seconds? I said 500 micro-seconds, because that is the attention span of modern man?
I am just joking. Actually the truth is digital age offers its own advantages and disadvantages.