Deep vs. Shallow Consumption

Compared and Contrasted

Deep vs. shallow consumption? This article compares and contrasts the mental effort, knowledge, creativity, memory, and more involved in consuming large, complex information versus smaller, simpler information. Which do you prefer?

There are many ways to “classify” how we consume information. I’d like the duality of “deep” and “shallow” consumption.

One can think of the “depth” of a piece of information as how much mental effort is needed to process it. A good intuition of depth is how deep a “buffer” is needed to consume the information, and how much time is needed to consume the information. Deep information needs a deep buffer, and more time to consume.

Let me try and add more colour to this spectrum by comparing its extremes: Deep information and Shallow information. I’m going to refer to the consumption of deep and shallow information as “deep consumption” and “shallow consumption” respectively.

1. Size and Time: Deep consumption involves consuming large pieces of information, which might take hours or days. Shallow consumption involves smaller pieces of information consumed over a short time.
2. “Buffer Size” and Mental Effort: Shallow consumption requires a smaller mental buffer; deep consumption requires a deeper buffer. A deeper buffer also implies more mental effort. It might also involve false starts and repetition.
3. Knowledge and Understanding: Deep consumption results in more ideas being consumed, and results in more understanding and more knowledge. Shallow consumption on the other hand results in a few new ideas being gained.
4. Connections and Creativity: Deep consumption results in the opportunity for more new connections in your brain — and hence more creativity.
5. Redundancy and Recall: Deep consumption results in the same information being stored in many parts of the brain. As a result, memory is more persistent and recall is easier.
6. Time to stimulation. Shallow consumption usually exploits simple familiarities, and hence results in quick stimulation (“instant gratification”). Deep consumption requires some time before familiarity can be established.
7. Initial consumption cost: Given the mental effort and delayed stimulation associated with deep information, Deep consumption has a much higher “initial cost”. Shallow consumption has very low cost.
8. Depth of stimulation. On the other hand, deep consumption results in connections being established with many familiar concepts as well as contrasting new ideas in a wider variety of ways. Hence, when stimulation happens it is deeper and more satisfying.
9. Complexity. Deep consumption involves consuming many different ideas. In contrast shallow consumption involves consuming a small number of ideas.
10. Similar information. As a result of lower complexity, it is easier to find other pieces of information similar to a given piece of shallow information — and justify why it is similar. This is much harder with complex deep information.
11. Suggestion and Chaining. Given that it is easier to find other similar pieces information to piece of shallow information, it is easier to “suggest” other pieces of information similar to shallow information. Hence, consumption of shallow information often involves the “chaining” of many pieces of similar information. For example, you might watch one short Cat-Video on YouTube, and end up watching 13 in succession. This type of “chaining” is hard with deep information.
12. Push vs. Pull. In contrast, since it is hard to “push” deep information to a consumer, consumption usually follows a “pull” model — with the consumer actively specifying what information he/she wants to consume.
13. Finite vs. Infinite. Another consequence of “chaining” is that shallow consumption is often unbounded. There is no limit of how many similar pieces of information you can consume. For example, “cute cat videos” returns nearly 800,000 results on Google. On the other hand, “a deep consumption session” actively chosen by the consumer is finite.

DALL.E-2