Updated December 09, 2019 08:15:43

When it was announced in October that Netflix was trialling a new variable playback option that would allow viewers to watch their titles sped up (or slowed down), filmmakers reacted with dismay.

Judd Apatow, director and screenwriter of Knocked Up and Funny People, tweeted: "Leave them as they were intended to be seen."

Filmmakers Brad Bird (The Incredibles), Peter Ramsey (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) and Peyton Reed (Ant-Man) also piled on.

"Having worked a lot in large-scale TV, it's kind of like sitting in a theatre audience and yelling out to the directors and the actors to 'hurry up!' it feels that rude as a concept," says Thomas M Wright, an Australian actor (Top of The Lake) and filmmaker (Acute Misfortune).

In fact, browser plugins that allow viewers to adjust the speed that they watch Netflix (and other video content) already exist.

Melbourne university student Seraphya told Stop Everything! that he watches YouTube videos at triple speed and Netflix at double speed.

"If you watch faster, you get to watch more shows," he says.

And speeding through video content seems like a natural evolution in one sense; first there was speed reading, then came speed listening, after podcasts and audiobooks invaded our phones.

Seraphya, a bioinformatics student, jacks up his podcast listening to triple speed.

"I'm listening for both knowledge and entertainment, and it's just boring to listen at single speed," he says.

He's also not particularly fazed by the concerns of content creators, pointing out that "we now know from musical historians that Beethoven was meant to be much faster than we currently generally perform it at so there's no use getting stuck with what was intended, because what was intended doesn't last".

Seraphya has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) but says that speed listening and watching actually calms him down, the stimulation allowing his brain to focus.

Emma, undertaking her teaching masters in Adelaide, ramps up her speed to dial down her FOMO: "I feel like there is so much to be seen and not enough time to see it in, so when I get the opportunity I do tend to ramp the speed up."

She recently watched historical action thriller Hotel Mumbai and Swedish fantasy Border "between x1.4 and x1.6 speed".

She's likely to use Netflix's faster playback option, but she believes "some things that are really stressful and distressing shouldn't be watched at speed", pointing to Netflix miniseries Unbelievable, based on a true story of rape and injustice, as an example.

"There will always be things I listen to at 1.0 speed, the things that I love," Emma says.

"It's irrational and personal, but isn't everybody's relationship to what they consume?"

Ian, a public servant in Queensland, listens to most podcasts on double speed and sometimes watches YouTube videos sped up, but says he won't be speeding through Netflix.

"I don't think I would do it for television shows I think they usually have particular production values that I don't think would be helped by watching them at a faster rate."

Director Thomas M Wright recognises that not all television is "carefully crafted" and some directors wouldn't be concerned by the idea of viewers speed-watching their work.

"But cinema takes years and people are actually orchestrating a completely false reality, and in order to do that it takes extraordinary investment and extraordinary care and the idea of that being trampled over for convenience is absurd," he says.

"Cinema for me is a machine of empathy and there's something that dies, the more people atomise it."

Joel Werner, host and producer of ABC podcast Sum of All Parts, understands why listeners speed up some podcast content but draws a line.

"I think watching a really good TV series or a really good movie, or listening to a really immersive audio documentary, it's an experience, right?"

"It's taking you to a different world, it's putting you in someone else's shoes, it's giving you a perspective on life that you didn't have before and I just don't think you can get any of that nuance when you listen at double the speed it was intended to be listened at," Werner says.

"So the theory on speed reading is it's more of a skim than a read," says Jared Cooney Horvath, an educational neuroscientist from The University of Melbourne.

Dr Horvath says that our ability to speed read is limited by the foveal spot at the back of the eye, "which essentially determines what you can focus on.

"If something isn't in that spot, then bad news, you're not going to be reading it and unfortunately, it's a very small spot."

When you combine our small foveal spots with the fact you need to move your eyes across a page to read, he says that even a speed reader would still take 10-20 seconds to read an average page of text.

While many seem to draw the line at narrative-based or fictional content, Dr Horvath says that "because of the way narratives are constructed, especially creative narratives, that's when you might be able to get away with it [skim reading]".

That's because fiction involves a degree of "redundancy" (repetition and references to characters, plot points and settings) which enables readers to make sense of a book while skimming through it.

But if you speed through nonfiction or anything you're planning to learn information from, "you get almost nothing out of it because you don't have these little points to use as kind of references," says Dr Horvath.

"Without that 'redundancy' you have nothing to hang your hat on. You get to the end and your comprehension is just trash."

The good news for speed-demons? Dr Horvath says that for speed listening and watching, anything up to x1.25 speed is "fine" in terms of recall and comprehension.

"As soon as you go above that, prepare to start just dropping key facts and that's just fact recall. Comprehension is [about] now how do you piece those facts together into a story."

As you recall fewer facts, Dr Horvath says your "comprehension tanks" compared to someone listening to or watching something on normal speed.

"When you're breastfeeding with your mother, you get a very certain chemical signature that spreads through your body which we think is a signature of bonding," Dr Horvath says.

"It turns out when you're lost in a narrative you get that same signature, so you're bonding. So when people say 'I love Dostoyevsky,' they're not being flippant, you're bonding with the author at that moment."

If you speed through a book, you risk losing the depth and engagement required to bond with the work.

Even so as long as the current glut of content exists, there are going to be people willing to sacrifice depth of engagement in favour of skimming as much of it as they can.

Dr Horvath traces the problem of "information overload" to the advent of the printing press, pinning this as the moment we were faced with a major decision between depth and breadth.

"The vast majority of people pick broad: 'I just want to listen to as many podcasts, watch as many shows, make sure I get everything'. And it's neither right nor wrong," he says.

But if you choose to speed through all three seasons of Stranger Things in one evening, don't expect it to make much of an impact.

"Deep learning is predicated on thinking," says Dr Horvath.

"You have to embed these memories and you have to give yourself time to think about them."

Rather than speed-watching, Dr Horvath suggests: "If you watch a show don't binge it, spend a day not watching the show, thinking about the episode you just watched, predicting what's going to come next."

"That's the deep thinking that makes the show resonate."

Topics:arts-and-entertainment,film-movies,film,television,popular-culture,books-literature,neuroscience,australia,united-states

First posted December 07, 2019 06:25:33

Read this article:
Netflix's speed-watching trial joins a long history of content cramming, but may be bad for artists and viewers - ABC News