George Supreeth

I find Video distracting

reading

Watching a TV show with me is an ordeal for my wife, though the sweet person that she is, she no longer complains about it. Only throws me a withering look, a suffering sigh. I know how much I annoy her, but I can’t help myself.

Video distracts me. I need to pause the show now and then, and rewind a few seconds because I find myself trying to catch a detail that I missed1. The phrasing of a joke. The number of cereal boxes on the kitchen shelf in the background, the pattern of sunlight on indoor plants.

It especially annoys me when this happens in the last few seconds of the show, and Netflix jumps to the next episode. I have a burning need to stop the show, go back to the previous episode, and forward it to the end, just so I can catch something I missed. Since I don’t want to annoy my girl any more than I already have, this means waiting until we’ve completed our ritual, she has left the room, so I can find that errant episode and find the unfulfilled piece that is burning my brain2.

It’s why I like to watch movies on my own, because I watch them in instalments. It takes me between 5–8 sittings, over two or three days to watch a movie, because I find it hard to pay attention to the plot3. I’m constantly scrubbing back and forth, and watching it in 10 minute increments.

On the other hand, I can read a book for hours on end. I scrub through books as well—flipping back a page or two to find a thread I missed that is relevant to the scene I’m reading. Sometimes, several chapters. With books, it’s so much easier, and I have fine-grained control.

It’s easier for me to pay attention to books because the scene is painted in my mind as a unit. With videos, the visuals compete—foreground against the background, the characters against the props, patterns against shapes4 and so on.

I also read a lot. Last year I read 41 books, most of them fantasy fiction. This was half of what I read in 2022, in large part because I also read a lot of articles saved on Pocket and Omnivore that year. In 2023, I read only two books, and easily hundreds of articles5, but I don’t know those numbers because I don’t count them.

Now that I use Wallabag, I have some sort of analytics to get an estimate. Wallabag says I read between 8 and 10 articles a day. These are on average about 1500 words each, so conservatively that is about 12000 to 15000 words a day with articles.

In any case, numbers like these are just a vanity metric when it comes to reading—they don’t mean shit. All that really matters is the enjoyment of reading good prose, and the slight panic that sets in when I know I’m at the end of a series by a good writer.

Video feels different. Sometimes I have to watch an educative video on YouTube, and I try to just grab the transcript if I can, so I can read it. Otherwise, I make notes—again, scrubbing back and forth even with the playback at twice it’s original speed.

The point is, video never grabs me the way text does.

spacer

Notes

  1. The autistic brain tends towards local visual processing before global processing kicks in, that is, the neurotypical brain sees the whole object first, and then processes the detail, whereas, the autistic brain sees the detail first before pulling back to see the whole. See this video on an interesting project by Erica Busch that uses eye-tracking to discover out how neurodiverse brains process visual information. ↩︎

  2. It’s not just me. A DuckDuckGo search led me to this discussion on Reddit. ↩︎

  3. Last night, I was watching the movie, Die Hard 3, with Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson. In a pivotal scene towards the end of the movie, Willis is reversing a dump truck through an underground aqueduct as a wall of water rushes towards him. The director chose to depict the imminent danger that Willis is in by showing the mad rush of the water in the rearview mirror of the truck. This is a great device, because we can see Willis’ reaction and also the water catching up with the truck.

    I missed it completely. My focus was on the excavation vehicles in the background, and I eventually noticed the rearview mirror only because I skipped back to see why the director chose to use that shot. ↩︎

  4. I find it interesting that people with ASD are better at detail because their brains ignore context, or as this paper puts it “Observers with ASD are better at copying impossible figures, likely resulting from an impaired ability to see, and so be distracted by, the impossible structure.” See the section—Ignoring Context: Local Visual Processing in this paper from Neuron._

    These kinds of effects are apparent to me when I draw people from life. When many of my artist friends struggle with gesture drawings of people in motion, especially when the overall shapes are complex–people in wheelchairs for example, I find that I can string together detail easily. On the other hand, drawing static objects like a building is hard for me because I have trouble seeing the forest for the trees, so to speak. ↩︎

  5. I’ve stopped reading non-fiction over the past decade. I prefer to do my non-fiction reading through articles instead. See the piece Finding the fiction in my non-fiction reading ↩︎

#Media #Attention