The Case for Deep Consumption
A 3D Metaphor for Information
TLDR: TLDR’s are a bad idea.
Metaphor
We consume information in different ways: From watching news videos, to reading books, to sitting through a 4-hour opera.
I like to think of the “volume” of information that we consume as the product of three separate dimensions: Intensity, Variety and “Meaningful” Time.
Intensity
By “Intensity” I mean the number of different ideas communicated in a unit of time. They say “A picture is worth a thousand words”. One reason for this is that it is easier to “pack” more information into a photo, drawing or diagram, than a book.
In other words, a photo has more intensity than a book.
Variety
By “Variety” I mean the types of different methods used to communicate information. A meme uses pictures and a few words. An opera might use music, song, poetry, drama, dance, and cinematic effects.
To put it another way, an opera has more variety than a meme.
“Meaningful” Time
By “Time” I mean “time” — or how much time the consumer spends consuming the information. One might sit through a 4 hour opera; or watch a tik-tok for precisely 9 seconds.
In my geometric metaphor, Intensity, Variety and Time correspond to Height, Width and Depth. Together their product is “Volume” — which itself is a metaphor for the total information consumed.
Why “Meaningful”? I will return to that at the end.
Why Deep Consumption?
To me, Height and Depth are a matter of artistic choice. There is nothing qualitatively superior about a taller mode compared to a shorter one (a picture vs. a book, for example). Nor are wider modes superior to narrower ones (a book vs. an opera).
However, I do think that deeper modes are superior to shallower modes; for two reasons.
- Our brains store information in a repeating and parallel manner. The same idea might “live” in multiple parts of the brain. “Input” into this type of storage requires time — to make sure that as many connections are made. This is why reading a 350 page book is more meaningful that reading a 200 word summary of the same.
- Deep consumption requires attention. Attention itself is an ability that grows or withers with use or disuse. The more deep consumption one engages, one’s ability for attention increases, and hence one is more capable of more deep consumption.
“Meaningful” Time and Meaningful Deep Consumption
For our brains to make the best use of ideas, they should be repeated in novel and imaginative ways.
For example, a 500 page book could present the same core idea in a 1000 different ways, connecting and contexualizing it with much of the readers prior knowledge.
Conversely, a 24 episode NetFlix series could be literally a drag — where the same thing happens in superficially disguised garbs.
Hence, depth must be measure, not in clock time, but in “meaningful” time, where we factor in if and to what extent the time has been spent well.
An implicit proxy for meaningful time could be how much time the production of the information took. One author could spend 15 years writing a 300 page novel — painfully revising and editing it, while getting feedback from multiple readers and editors. Another could regurgitate a 300 page pastiche in a week. One is a lot more meaningful than the other.
