Is it a problem of information processing?

[Seechain]

I started thinking about my youth. I used to watch a movie on weekends. Once a month I would read a UFO magazine. I only watched anime on TV.

There wasn't so much information. There was time to process things, even to repeat them.

Now I see many lists from young people where they have watched hundreds of movies, hundreds of series, and have read hundreds of books. In such a short time? I have had decades to process all of that.

What is happening?
Is it some kind of race to absorb information?
Is that why we see practices like watching videos at 2x speed and reading diagonally?

I also notice that they are not happy with this. There is a kind of pressure to see everything just to check it off. Additionally, older people seem to demand that they process even more to catch up with them.

What do you all think?

[Noah_S]

What I remember from my school days is that one teacher would complain when I refused to "read fast". She was attempting to teach me to skim texts and it wasn't working because I realized that I failed to absorb any information and just refused to do it.

A few years later my peers were reading our textbooks fast, but they had to read the same thing multiple times to actually know what it said. I was still reading at my natural pace, but I only had to read one time. Often my one time ended up being quicker than their 5 times. And I've realized that what that teacher was teaching wasn't reading fast as much as it was looking like we were reading fast.

I do wonder if there's a connection between this and what you describe

[Melooon]

I think it depends on what you're actually looking for from information. Most people don't analyze or process information at all, they simply encounter it, take it at face value and move on.

They gain the basic structural information, e.g. character x is friends with character y, character y is a bad guy etc. Within that they can absorb details that they understand (e.g. character y is an fallen hero with a recovery arc, or the animation is nice), but they discard details they don't understand (e.g. character x is representing xyz in society, or that shot is an incredibly unusually way to film a scene like this).

The process of analysis is about learning to see and understand details you don't understand; but you don't actually have to do that. You can consume a vast amount of information and learn very little from it, although over time you will pick up extra bits within that quantity.

That's quite different from someone who actively wants to consume information in order to learn something from it. That's a much slower process and needs to happen over many years and it also tends to push you towards different kinds of information depending on what you want to learn.

Then there's a third version again, where you consume media as a tool to process separate information within yourself, essentially using media as a lens to look back at yourself, that's different again!