this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2024
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Humanities & Cultures

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Hot take: It’s okay if we don’t consume all of the world’s information before we die (gkeenan.co)
submitted 8 months ago by alyaza@beehaw.org to c/humanities@beehaw.org
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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.

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[–] sodalite@slrpnk.net 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] eveninghere@beehaw.org 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Ironically, this is almost how I feel about TikTok.