One of the more distressing qualities of humanity, in my mind, is the emphasis we collectively put on “efficiency.”¹ It saturates our professional existence. It haunts our socioeconomic barometer. And it drives our current approach to both creating and appreciating art. It’s insidious, the inordinate amount of power “efficiency” holds over our daily lives, without even drawing much attention to itself, creeping up in unanticipated ways: the life hacks bombarding us on TikTok; the large language models we use to reduce the amount of effort we need to put into writing an email to our colleague; the Trim Silence feature on our podcast player of choice.
[…]I will admit that this is perhaps a weird hill to die on, but I truly believe that Trim Silence is an abomination that should be fully eradicated from existence, as it not only spits in the face of the people who take the time and effort to produce their shows, but also, more broadly, encourages a way of interfacing with art that can only be described as gluttonous.
I haven’t listened yet but this relates to something that’s been bugging me and I haven’t found the right place to write it. This is also part of why I never got into TikTok in the first place. I did have a TikTok account for a few days and tried to see what the hype was about after all these years. But I was immediately turned off by the fact that after a video plays it goes down straight to the next one. It’s not like Insta where you can control the speed at which you scroll through the content. It forces speed onto you. I could only use the app for a few minutes before getting overstimulated and overwhelmed and had to close it. I never installed it again.
It all comes back to the manifestations of this need for efficiency. There’s cultural pressure to consume the next content chunk, while incentives or abilities to stop and savor things have been removed.
I keep thinking of Thoreau’s advice to “simplify, simplify.” Corporations wanna keep adding all these extra features that supposedly increase efficiency but they just create complications and headaches for their users.
Ironically, this is almost how I feel about TikTok.
I had no idea that Trim Silence is a thing, but I can see how that would make audio recordings sound janky. There are times when I’ll speed up playback to 2x, but that’s usually because the person talking is taking too long to get to the point. Sounds like overkill to me.
I went back to using RSS after I ditched corporate social media in part because I like that the content is just there until I’m ready to read it. I use the Top Day sort on Lemmy and the microblogging platforms are constantly putting new posts in the feed; this is fine for casual scrolling, but I can see how this would be exhausting to people who are trying to keep up with everything. I get the author’s need to take a breather every so often. I also find myself wishing that people would chill a bit.
I find that for recipe or how-to stuff, if I have a choice between video or blog post I’ll almost always choose post so I can scroll to the part(s) I’m looking for.
I wonder how much SEO and promoting sponsors/“please like/subscribe” (and monetization of content in general) has increased people using efficiency tools to be able to get to the main content. I know the podcast app I use has a setting where it’ll auto-skip X seconds of the start of podcasts.
I do and don’t disagree, but I think it’s contextual.
I 100% agree that we don’t have to consume all information - nor should we in most cases. Using tools to cut down time infringes on the art, hampering the users experience with it supplanting it with FOMO.
At the same time, if I’m delving into a niche topic or a hobby that I want practice in, I would absolutely use Trim Silence if there isn’t a better alternative - I would prefer a script in most cases given that it would be a step-by-step process, where a video has to be replayed. So in that regard I disagree, but I would say that’s less about consuming all and more about consuming a specific facet of “all” that I’m interested in.
the large language models we use to reduce the amount of effort we need to put into writing an email to our colleague;
In this case, I think work culture and burn-out is what leads to this. If Jane is too wiped to type and e-mail, she shouldn’t be working. But she has to, so shit man use ChatGPT I don’t give a fuck. Same if that’s the only way she is able to produce art to express herself, I don’t blame her or AI, I blame the culture (corporatocracy) that brought us to this point. Which comes back to sort of why I disagree about consuming all - I personally disagree and don’t think we need to or should, but I also think if that’s what people want to do to escape the bullshit then that’s well within their right. I would prefer if people were able to respect their own time and experience the art, but I also understand that their time is not respected.
All this to say,
Viewer, please check the box below to confirm that you understand by skipping this content you are modifying the artistic expression intended to be evoked by viewing.
[x]
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footnote 3: And by extension: any feature that speeds up the audio or video we consume
I disagree that speeding up something is the same thing at all. Playing something at a constant rate (faster or slower) still maintains the editorial choices that the author was talking about.
I speed up plenty of things I listen to, and it’s not (primarily) to get through them quicker.
Across the world it’s the case that city folk tend to speak quicker than their rural countrymen. American speak slower, on average, than Brits. And that’s fine! However, I find it hard to maintain focus when the speech is too slow - so speeding it up allows me to enjoy it like intended.
I definitely agree that the trim silence feature sound awful.
While I also hate the lost nuances resulting from that feature and also hate the disposability we’re all encouraged to treat our media with, I don’t know that those are necessarily related like this article assumes.
Some things you listen to aren’t really recorded with this kind of nuance in the first place and speeding them up like this can actually improve the quality of the listening experience. Some people just aren’t great speakers but still have things to say that you want to listen to and the stuff this improves tends to be more improved than the stuff it hurts gets hurt by. Which is to say, while I don’t use it myself, if I’m hearing somebody else’s podcast and I notice something is weird about the timing and comment on that, the only response I’ve ever gotten is “oh, I turned that on earlier and forgot it was still on”.
