skimming, stimming, & masturbating without touching ourselves
life in the 3.5x speed lane
Some 24–36 hours before bullets were fired at a former POTUS speaking at a campaign stop, a swath of Twitter was abuzz and aghast at the anime-viewing habits of one “Cone.” Professing to “worship at the altar of productivity,” Cone explains how he uses a Chrome extension to speedwatch anime, breezing through the slow expositional stuff, slowing down for the exciting parts, and quickly rewinding whenever he shoots past the start of an unexpected action scene.
As I’m typing this, the tweet has been viewed more than 7 million times, and Cone has fewer than 1500 followers. Clearly Cone hasn’t just struck a cultural nerve, but a moral one. Some replies:1
Instead of engaging with a piece of media, these sorts ser everything in terms of quantity and "How many Episodes/movies/shows can I 'watch' in a day", só they can check everything off their checklist while absorbing nothing
You're not an "enjoyer of many things" if you just binge everything like it's just disposable content. You actually enjoy nothing, you just consume braindeadly. This is so stupid, holy shit.
All media is just disposable to these people.
why not just read a fucking summary of the episode at that point jesus christ
At that point not even watching/reading for the story anymore you’re just consuming content for the sake of it being content
Character building and world building?
Him: skip skip skip, who needs it?Cool fight scene?
Him: watches normally.If anything, fights can be fast forwarded lol. Does he not want to understand the plot?
"Everything in my life has to be productive"
>Proceeds to watch entertainment/art in the least productive manner possible by making sure he doesn't absorb ANY of it
Devil’s advocate: contrary to Cone’s critics, what’s on display here is sophistication. What we are seeing is the deep interiorization of a medium that has reached a far-advanced stage in its development.
Some thoughts:
1.
Illiterate people don’t skim texts. Have you watched children learning to read, pointing at each individual word on the page (or screen) and laboriously sounding out the individual letters? Reading quickly and selectively, gleaning only the basic gist of what’s on the page, requires years of training.2
I’ve observed many small children watching cartoons on tablets in various waiting rooms, airplanes, and restaurants. I’m pretty sure most of them know how to skip around the progress bar if they wanted to—but to the best of my recollection, I’ve never seen them doing it.
I remember when I was three or four years old, my parents taped a few hours of Woody Woodpecker, Disney, and Warner Bros. from a television station. I must have watched the thing a hundred times. When I was three or four years old. By then I was capable of pressing the button to turn on the TV, insert the tape in the VCR, and press play. I knew how to rewind the tape, and how to use the fast-forward button—but I didn’t ever speed through the taped commercials or the shorts I didn’t like as much.
Children can’t distinguish between commercials and programming, between good TV and crap TV.3 It takes time to become a “literate” viewer of television who has an idea of what to watch and what to skip, and to know when to pay attention and when to get a snack without worrying about missing something important.
2.
We are only able to skim a book or newspaper page (or their digital analogues) because our writing system is the result of some 3000 years of cumulative technical refinements.
The Greek phonetic alphabet perfected its Phoenician template with the addition of vowels. Roman writing, like the Greek from which it was derived, had no letter cases, and usually lacked both spaces between words and punctuation marks. The Carolingian script developed during the eighth century set a new standard for Western writing by inventing upper- and lower-case letters, introducing new punctuation marks, and placing spaces between words—but even those of us who can read Latin, Middle English, etc. would find it difficult to skim or speed-read through any medieval documents, given how accustomed our eyes are to the clean parsimony of type fonts.4
We can read speedily, we can skip to the end of one sentence and resume at the beginning of the next, and we can guess at the idea of a few lines of text by taking them in at once and noticing key words because we’ve offloaded so much of the cognitive burden of relating two-dimensional symbols to the sounds and meanings of speech onto our written typed language and its conventions of composition. For us it’s easy to get the basic idea of a paragraph without having to squint and concentrate because the text practically does our reading for us.
3.
Try skimming this excerpt from Understanding Media:
ifthemoviemergesthemechanicalandorganicinaworldofundulatingformsitalsolinkswiththetechnologyofprintthereaderinprojectingwordsasitwerehastofollowtheblackandwhitesequencesofstillsthatistypographyprovidinghisownsoundtrackhetriestofollowthecontoursoftheauthorsmindatvaryingspeedsandwithvariousillusionsofunderstandingitwouldbedifficulttoexaggeratethebondbetweenprintandmovieintermsoftheirpowertogeneratefantasyintheviewerorreadercervantesdevotedhisdonquixoteentirelytothisaspectoftheprintedword
Not easy to skim—but not difficult to read, provided we roll over it slowly and deliberately. (Pronouncing the letters out loud, or at least moving your mouth, can be very helpful.) The reader must concentrate on parsing the text in order to read it, because he finds himself looking through a fog when he employs his usual speed-reading tricks (reading words only partially, peripherally looking ahead for key terms, deliberately passing over words, and so on). We must read it to ourselves somewhat as we would to an audience.
Now try skimming this:
If the movie merges the mechanical and organic in a world of undulating forms, it also links with the technology of print. The reader in projecting words, as it were, has to follow the black and white sequences of stills that is typography, providing his own sound track. He tries to follow the contours of the author’s mind, at varying speeds and with various illusions of understanding. It would be difficult to exaggerate the bond between print and movie in terms of their power to generate fantasy in the viewer or reader. Cervantes devoted his Don Quixote entirely to this aspect of the printed word…
The first version of the paragraph, compelling the reader to take in each individual word, fosters just the kind of reading habits that would be valuable in Western manuscript culture, where literate people were generally expected to master or memorize small collections of canonical texts. It’s much easier to speed through the second version—to read it inattentively, to hack out its meaning for short-term retention by recognizing, combining, and contextualizing key terms.
Did advances in typography make us worse readers? If the only metrics we’re using are comprehension and retention—definitely so. But if the aim to is keep up with current events, compose an undergraduate research paper against a deadline, make a spot assessment of a novel at the airport bookstore, or use a reference book (or more likely Wikipedia), the benefits of slow and steady don’t always compensate for the costs. Skimming is an intensification of reading behavior in how it allows us to take in information more rapidly than another human being could ever vocally communicate it to us.
4.
Black-and-white text is a static and anesthetic medium; the progress from speech to script to print consisted of an incremental divestiture of sensory content and prompts for physical activity.
Reading
A SENTENCE WITH VERY LARGE LETTERS
isn’t remotely similar to listening to VERY LOUD speech or music; the words “naked sexy woman,” or even a paragraph of description, don’t trigger as strong or direct a physiological response as an old Playboy centerfold.
This is to say that “skimming” behavior applied to a more sensuous medium than print intensifies the experience in a much different way, along a different axis.
Moreover: video content, like print, had to progress through a series of technological advances and reformattings before it could be skimmed—and before we had been made ready to skim it.
5.
It would be onerous to recount the genealogy of the streaming video player because we’re dealing with a composite technology whose separate parts can be traced back to the photograph, the phonograph, television, ENIAC, etc. But the development from the film projector to video cassette players to digital video was shaped up by market actors who understood that viewers appreciated convenience and control (as do people in general), and would invest in media products that offered them more.
Television may not have had the high-resolution visuals, the audio quality, or the star power of a Hollywood reel screened at a downtown cinema—but what the Rabbit Ears had going for it was being right there in middle America’s living room, ready to activate at the turn of a dial. There was no need to drive twenty minutes to a theater, and no charge to view The Honeymooners or Perry Mason after the initial purchase.5 And if a viewer disliked what they were watching, there were at least two other streams of content to click over to instead.
Still, one persistent advantage of film was that if someone particularly enjoyed a movie, they could return to the theater a few days later, buy another ticket, and see it again. Conversely, after a television episode aired, the viewer couldn’t hope to watch it again until rerun season.
From the Middle Ages up to the early Renaissance, reading for entertainment was a social occasion; with the maturation of print culture, evolving practices transformed it to a private activity. The release of Betamax and VHS video cassette recorders (VCRs) in the 1970s catalyzed an analogous change in the public’s relationship with film by making it possible for the movie fan to say: I’ll wait for it to come out on video.
Watching movies and recorded television broadcasts at home, whenever one wished, and being able to fast-forward through ads, back up ten seconds to view an exciting moment a second time, and hit the pause button to take a bathroom break—all of this was revolutionary. And by digital standards, it was embarrassingly clunky. Since winding back or speeding forward through the runtime entailed physically rotating the wheels of a cassette tape, skipping from the start of a long movie to the 90-minute mark—or even rapidly jumping ahead at intervals of five or ten seconds—could never be instantaneous, and it was prone to imprecision.
Leaping from one scene to the next with the push of a button and selecting a point in the runtime with a slider tool had to wait for digital video formats.
Most consumer VCRs muted the audio after the rewind and fast-forward buttons were pressed; only on the expensive “pro-end” could you watch a tape at three times normal speed and listen to the actors chittering like squirrels. This just wasn’t a feature that the manufacturers thought most consumers were interested in, and they were right. If you’re seven years old, holding down a button on the VCR or the remote to watch Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader carrying on as though each had taken equally heroic doses of amphetamine and helium might be good for a laugh—but nobody else would see the point, much less espouse it as a productivity-enhancing life hack.
6.
Before the invention of the Gutenberg press, there was no such thing as “light reading.” Before TV, people wouldn’t have thought to watch a movie “in the background.”
More than just acting as a template for content, the format determines the media environment—and the media environment formats thought, habit, and desire. The successful innovator is often the one who can best guess or intuit what people will discover they want two days from now, after today’s media environment makes them different people tomorrow.
7.
Some Sunday mornings, my wife and I lie in bed showing each other (read: forcing each other to watch) clips from TV shows and movies on her smartphone. Sometimes we can find them on YouTube; other times we have to visit a disreputable pirate site and click on the progress bar a few times to reach the scene of interest.
If we were living in, say, 2001, and watching this stuff on a DVD player hooked up to a television in the living room—or even on a laptop we’d taken into bed with us—this would be so cumbersome as to be pointless. Opening the disc tray. Taking out the disc. Getting up to put the disc back where it belongs and retrieve the next disc. Putting the new disc in the tray. Listening to the whirring noises. Waiting. Waiting. Browsing the scene menu and realizing—oh wait, I was thinking of History of the World, not Blazing Saddles, and I don’t own a copy of History of the World. Well, I’m not giving up my turn, so let me get up and go look for Young Frankenstein and we’ll watch the part where the monster meets the blind man…
Today the idea of having to leave the house, drive half an hour, and spend $30 on DVD in order to watch a movie at one’s leisure seems as tragic to us as the journey of a medieval monk traveling halfway across Europe to consult a particular commentary on Aristotle that might be in the library of another monastery.
Whenever I happen to wander into a comic book store these days, I find myself wondering—what’s the point? All of those bagged back-issues of DC and Marvel serials in cardboard boxes exist for hoarders now, not for readers. I can’t help but look at every Batman or X-Men trade paperback in terms of how much it weighs and how much volume it will occupy in a cardboard box the next time we have to pack up and move somewhere else.
I still read comics—but mostly on my desktop, or on my wife’s tablet. I don’t read them as attentively as I did when I used to bring home graphic novels from Barnes & Noble, but them’s the breaks. A personal investment in a cultural object typically exists in inverse proportion to the abundance and cheap availability of similar artifacts, as we’ve seen before.
8.
In 2014, the Washington Post published an article titled “Serious reading takes a hit from online scanning and skimming, researchers say.”
This wasn’t a revelation: educators, psychologists, culture critics, and myriad other interested parties had been sounding the alarm and publishing worrisome new observations and research for several years by that point.
An excerpt (with parts bolded to facilitate skimming):
Before the Internet, the brain read mostly in linear ways — one page led to the next page, and so on. Sure, there might be pictures mixed in with the text, but there didn’t tend to be many distractions. Reading in print even gave us a remarkable ability to remember where key information was in a book simply by the layout, researchers said. We’d know a protagonist died on the page with the two long paragraphs after the page with all that dialogue.
The Internet is different. With so much information, hyperlinked text, videos alongside words and interactivity everywhere, our brains form shortcuts to deal with it all — scanning, searching for key words, scrolling up and down quickly. This is nonlinear reading, and it has been documented in academic studies. Some researchers believe that for many people, this style of reading is beginning to invade when dealing with other mediums as well.
“We’re spending so much time touching, pushing, linking, scrolling and jumping through text that when we sit down with a novel, your daily habits of jumping, clicking, linking is just ingrained in you,” said Andrew Dillon, a University of Texas professor who studies reading. “We’re in this new era of information behavior, and we’re beginning to see the consequences of that.”
Since then, our habits of interacting with digital media—not to mention the sheer abundance of video content, the instantaneity with which we can move to different moments on the progress bar, and the speed with which can terminate one video and begin viewing another—has also made us nonlinear viewers.
It should be no surprise that somebody using a laptop, tablet, or smartphone to view content on YouTube, Netflix, Crunchyroll, etc. would be prone to skimming video content much in the same way they might jump through a block of text in a browser window. My sister has been using TikTok for a few years now, and lately I’ve noticed that giving a 24-minute TV show her undivided, uninterrupted attention seems to have become a challenge for her.
Reading irritated anime fans’ replies to Cone’s video reminded me of an exasperated bookworm complaining about how Kids Today spurn the novels they’re assigned to read for school and glance at plot synopses instead—or grieving that more and more of their friends are inattentively listening to titles on Audible at work and equating it to actually reading those books.
9.
Imagine: it’s 1999, and you’re given a one-of-a-kind VHS player with a button on its remote control that works like pressing the right arrow key while a YouTube video is fullscreened: the tape miraculously skips five seconds ahead, with zero latency. It also gives you the option to accelerate and slow down playback by increments of 0.25 percent normal speed—seamlessly, immediately—much in the way Cone toggles the pace of a Hunter × Hunter episode for his viewing pleasure.
Your sensibilities would need some time to catch up to the idea of it. Having driven to Blockbuster and handed over cash for a video rental to take home, wouldn’t you be losing value by skipping through half its runtime? Having gone to the trouble to program your VCR to tape a particular television show while you were away, why wouldn’t you watch all of it? And if the director intended for a scene to play out at a certain pace for a certain duration, why not leave it alone and watch the movie the way he or she made it for you?
Then—lightbulb blinks on when you pop in a tape from your stack of XXX videos. So this what that thing is for, you realize as you learn to control the playback such that the content matches, heightens, and mitigates your state of arousal.
Whether they realized it or not, what upset anime fans about Cone’s video was how he boasts about watching Crunchyroll like it was Pornhub: without any appreciation for craft or interest in the story, just skipping ahead to the good bits, the juicy bits. Everything else for him is like so much dilatory foreplay leading up to the penetration, and shots from less flattering angles or exciting perspectives, all to be fast-forwarded through.
But why shouldn’t he watch it this way? There’s an effectively infinite supply of content at his fingertips at any moment. Thirty seconds feeling less than scintillatingly buzzed by any one media artifact is thirty seconds he could be getting more dopamine released by instantaneously pulling up and engaging with something else instead.
Meanwhile: as Cone exercises his control over the video player, the player operates on his senses and mind. Someone watching porn or anime or anything else the way Cone does is basically, as per McLuhan, manipulating his own eyes and ears and nerves in such a way that he’s effectively turning a set of of knobs in his endocrine and nervous systems, playing himself like a musical instrument. By watching anime the way he does, Cone isn’t maximizing productivity, but maximizing value by intensifying his experience.
“The essence of pornography permeates all visual and televisual techniques,” Baudrillard wrote in the 1990s. Three decades later, we can observe how our habits of media use in general are increasingly identical to how we consume and relate to porn.
I should mention that I stole this post’s preview image from this user’s response.
What it might say about one’s attention span is another question entirely.
The difference in quality between the average short starring Bugs Bunny and the average short starring Woody Woodpecker is a bit like the gap between a novel by Ernest Hemingway and a novel by Ernest Cline. It was a long time before that was evident to me.
For the youngsters: there was no such thing as a subscription package because television was, as they say, “on the airwaves.” You tuned into NBC, CBS, and ABC’s television stations as you would their radio stations.
I agree with all of this. Which leads me to my deep concern, which anyone who has suffered any kind of addiction (heroin/sex/porn/etc) could probably attest to:
Once you've developed a method to produce maximum pleasure in yourself, you'll keep chasing it no matter what, for ever-diminishing returns, and all the meanwhile your body and mind are growing weaker and less responsive.
The younger someone is, the worse the damage. For instance, as a teacher at an elementary school, I'm no stranger to seeing kids get picked up from school with a Nintendo Switch already waiting for them in the car. This is often the case for kids who can't even read yet because they're in kindergarten or first grade. Their media consumption diet contains heavy doses of things like Mr. Beast, which they can access pretty easily even without necessarily knowing how to read or type. (Just click on the thing that grabs your eye, and then keep clicking.) On the last day of school last year I tried to show a (fun, non-educational) kids movie revolving around a certain well-known mustachioed plumber, and was astonished to find that most kindergarteners and about half of all first graders refused to pay attention to or engage with the film in any way because it was too "slow" and "boring." Now, let's get one thing straight--these kids LOVE Mario. They'll be the first to tell you so! They've just been raised on such a constant diet of hyperstimulation that they never developed the level of attention span required to *watch a movie.* The second graders were all right, for the most part, but I remember loving movies even as a three-year-old. If this is the state of things, then it's not wonder that Millennials and (especially) Generation Alpha don't generally afford the art form of cinema any cultural clout.
Okay, I like this essay, but I'm going to tell you that I disagree at least a little bit on that idea that children can't distinguish between content. At least if we're talking about commercials anyway. Because just like you I learned how to use a VCR when I was 4. But I DID fast-forward through those commercials. I didn't even have a remote, I would actually get up and run and hit that fast forward button when my family was watching a taped show, and then try to rewind back to the exact spot if I overshot. I learned very quickly that the ads are not part of the show. And I'll admit I'm just guessing here, but I'm sure there are a few depressing 4 year olds growing up on those tablets that will skip the ads on Youtube after 5 seconds. Like crust on a sandwich, it doesn't take long for kids to reject what they don't want to consume.