Apparently, this piece should take you seven minutes to read. If you take eight, you’ve suffered a cognitive decline. If you take six, you’re probably just scanning while you wait for Candy Crush Saga to open on your phone, you braindead meat-puppet slave to the dopamine industry.
Nope, seven minutes. No more, no less.
Isn’t it helpful having some guidelines for consuming creative work?
I think so. In fact, I think we should extend this practice to other media. At MoMA’s Ed Ruscha show two months back, I must have been standing in front of 1961’s “OOF” for four minutes, like a total jackass, solely because no one had tucked a discreet “viewing time” into the placard’s info.
The other day, I got lost in Seamus Heaney’s poem “Casualty,” which lovingly details the appearance and habits of a stout-soaked fisherman regular at the speaker’s local, folding his death by sectarian violence into the first stanza — “blown to bits/Out drinking in a curfew/Others obeyed” — then describing the movements that led to his end as if compelled by instinct or fate:
He had gone miles away
For he drank like a fish
Night, naturally
Swimming towards the lure
Of warm lit-up places
The blurred mesh and murmur
Drifting among glasses
After this, I got so immersed in the vivid portraiture, muted grief, and treacherous dips and dives of verse that I must have spent a good 40 minutes reading the damn thing and it’s not even 500 words. That’s one minute, tops!
At least with movies you know where you stand. Ever since the dawn of home video, studios have been good about labeling their releases with a running time right up with the title, cast, and MPAA rating, at the expense of any gloss on the film. What’s it about? It’s about 120 minutes.
In fact, for years, the running time was my son’s sole criterion for choosing a movie. Anything shorter than 45 minutes and you were stepping on his product, messing with his supply — forcing him to endure an extra 30 to 45 minutes of reality. I can see his point, but even these metrics will prove unstable in the mutating time-space continuum of digital life.
In 1997, the film Titanic arrived at theaters as 18 reels of 35mm celluloid. That’s more than three miles of film. How long to view? As long as the actual Titanic took to sink.
This was clearly a different era. Around that time, I remember seeing a brilliant piece of visual art that used the 1997 film to look far into the future. Though the work is ungoogle-able, even its raw specs perform well: a large-scale, wall-mounted work that took the entire linear celluloid product that is Titanic and spread it across its massive visual field.
The result was a giant technicolor smear, the countless undifferentiated frames melding into one massive variegated gouache of color and form. The work derived a deep, static abstraction from a $200 million piece of storytelling. That, or it gave us a glimpse of our media’s future.
I’ve heard enough people telling me that they consume podcasts and YouTube clips at a playback speed of at least 1.25x that I assume the standard practice is ticking upward. That a significant percentage of consumers are already listening at 2x, and that soon only Boomer squares will hear Alvin and the Chipmunks where others just hear the news. Many are convinced a similar trend will transform how we view movies.
Five years after Titanic, Hollywood leapt into the digital future with the stinker Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones, the first major studio film to be released as a digital file, which soon became industry standard. The next great leap forward came in 2012, when The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey released with an unusually high-frame rate (48 frames per second, rather than the standard 24 fps), making an even stronger argument against this kind of progress.
If you saw it, you might remember the dispiriting impression that the land and people of Middle Earth looked flat, airless, and plainly artificial. In doubling the data used to capture this imaginary world — and thus giving it the razor-sharp definition of a Yankees game on a LCD TV at Best Buy — the filmmakers gave it the same cheap-looking “soap opera effect” that’s produced by the digital interpolation of TV’s “motion smoothing,” but with a blockbuster irony: this high-tech realism makes everything fake.
I bring this up because it gets at the disorienting effect I perceive in a lot of cultural products — film, music, prose — that are produced, or even consumed, though technology we still don’t fully understand. I don’t anyway. And increasingly I find myself looking for evidence that I’m not imagining all this.
Is there really some ineffable x-factor missing in some of these digitally condensed, hi-def products of warpspeed mechanical reproduction or am I just stuck in an old paradigm?
Those who grimaced at the early movies with high-fps likely found a deeper awareness of the essential magic of cinema, this still-strange medium that’s somewhere between painting and photography. But since high fps works great for sports and gaming, others felt that the grimacers’ real problem was not dying out fast enough.
“Some people have spoiled their brains by watching 24 fps movies and have gotten used to it,” posted one Redditor. “The boomers in the movie industry that have gotten used to this bad thing are trying to force feed it to the younger generation.”
Maybe that’s my problem: I’ve gotten used to this bad thing.
Not long ago, I adjusted to the screenwriting rule of thumb that 1 page = 1 minute of screen time, but that was nothing. We recently entered a world in which you can punch a few phrases into some software, push a button, and see a 10,000-word essay appear on your laptop.
I realized as I was writing this, with my hands and brain, that the feeling I get reading generative AI prose is a lot like the one I had watching those early adventures in high-fps cinema — the sense of an eerie vacancy at the center of everything, the absence of ghost in machine.
A prof who writes under the pseudonym Mark Papers described the same thing in a recent post in The London Review of Books’ blog, detailing the uncanny tell of student essays that relied heavily on generative AI:
Usually, when students don’t do the reading or the thinking, there’s an associated sloppiness at the sentence level. Now I occasionally come across writing that is superficially slick and grammatically watertight, but has a weird, glassy absence behind it.
Is there really a weird, glassy absence behind everything? Or did this prof just get used to a bad thing?
I’ve been around long enough not to expect private-equity-controlled companies to care if their shift to cost-saving mass production yields something worse than the bespoke version, or drives a whole social stratum from the middle class. But I still want to be a good consumer. I keep looking for helpful guidelines.
In Walden, Thoreau wrote that “the cost of a thing is the amount of … life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”
I’d call this counsel worth heeding if I didn’t know that Walden is only a 3 hr. 16 min. read. Maybe we’re better off seeking the wisdom of Barbra Streisand, whose new memoir’s audiobook clocks in at 48 hours and 17 minutes.
Or maybe it’s simply time to recalibrate our consumption time based on our new breed of authors. If generative AI’s scalable, extractive verbiage-mining systems are the future, we need a metric for consuming this work.
Time to write: 20 seconds. Time to read?
Let’s just let AI do that too.