The Future of Reading, Listening, and Watching: Addition by Subtraction
Annotation — not abstinence — is the answer to the gift of abundance
When I became a new dad, I had new motivation — a new need — to squeeze more time out of every day. That motivation isn’t something unique to new parents; the preservation and pursuit of time is part of the human condition. So, I’ve been on a multiyear effort to trim-the-fat from every part of my daily routine. In particular, I used to spend an inordinate amount of time in the process of consuming content, like reading, watching, and listening to media, plus all of the associated knowledge management. Therefore, I’ve been really focused on increasing the efficiency of my interactions with all the media I consume.
To wit, in his 1957 treatise, An Economic Theory of Democracy, Anthony Downs classified the types of knowledge we consume, neatly summarized as follows:
“[There’s a difference between] entertainment information — stuff you read because you enjoy it — to production information — stuff you read because you think it’ll help you make money. [There are only] four types of information…
1. Production information helps you make smarter business decisions; if you’re a stockbroker, The Wall Street Journal is production information for you.
2. Consumption information makes you a better consumer; if you’re going to a movie this weekend, Rotten Tomatoes is consumption information for you.
3. Entertainment information is … anything you consume primarily to be entertained, whether high culture (a great novel) or low (a Kardashian).
4. Political information is anything that makes you a more informed voter [which is] the toughest one to sell”
For me, entertainment information (#3) was the first to go. But, while it was easy for me to purge things like TV and idle browsing, the lionshare of my time was captured by production information (#1) — and rather inelastically so. After all, it’s mission-critical stuff for any knowledge worker or any intellectually curious mind.
That genre became the focus of my efforts, in which I kept getting caught on the same snag: Too much of my time was wasted just getting to the point. Once I started pulling on that string, I couldn’t stop, and thus began my unraveling of the consumer experience — a story that has profound insights and implications for the media industry at large.
The status quo
When I looked at the fundamentals, I realized that, despite the digital revolution, the product and service of media remain status quo — at least as far as content producers are concerned. Whether user interface (UI) or user experience (UX), today’s content is still just an imitation of its predecessors. Text, video, and audio are all stuck impersonating yesterday’s antiquated newspapers, TV, and radio. From “Wither the Consumer”:
“The earliest digital content imitated traditional, physical media. In fact, for a long time, destinations like newspaper homepages looked and acted just like their physical predecessors. A lot has changed over the last decade though. As we’re now all online all the time, content producers have to meet consumers where they live.”
For consumers, however, the entire media experience has grown obsolete. The process of enjoying good content is way harder than it should be, with unnecessary frictions making it needlessly time-consuming to ingest the media that’s actually valuable to each of us. Callie Schweitzer cites one such culprit, the tyranny of choice:
“The process of getting news involves more choice than ever. We have access to unlimited options and sources to fill what seems like ever more limited time. This paradox of choice can be incredibly overwhelming if it’s not streamlined or ritualized in some way — hence why we form news reading habits.”
So, we form new habits, improvising to cope with all of the noise:
- Our attention span has slipped down to a mere 8.25 seconds;
- 81% of us skim everything we read;
- We only finish 9% of the content that we start; then,
- We forget 90% of that knowledge within a few days
Suffice to say, the media product in the marketplace today doesn’t meet our wants and needs as modern consumers! Instead, it tries to jam us into a Procrustean Bed.
Media evolution (and obsoletion)
To really understand why the modern media consumer’s contortion is so negligent, you have to understand the modern context.
Throughout history, the media business was predicated on scarcity. There were huge barriers to entry, like expensive printing presses and distribution infrastructure. If you could afford the startup costs of a newspaper business, for example, your reward was an effective monopoly: one newspaper and tens-of-thousands of subscribers. Accordingly, the product itself was scarce, so the balance-of-power always lay in the hands of producers.
In contrast, today, the internet has eliminated the barriers to entry, and now anyone can produce and distribute content. In this age of abundance, wherein seemingly infinite content supply competes for scarce consumer demand, the balance-of-power has shifted to you, the consumer.
Yet, you still have to waste way too much of your time to get way too little value out of your user experience. Innovations like blogging and social media have exponentially improved how content is produced, but nothing has made it proportionally easier or better to consume.
This isn’t a trivial problem. In fact, the average American spends more than 15 hours per day consuming media. That means a 10% improvement in consumer efficiency could save you 90 minutes gross per day. Taken even further, a 10x improvement could not only save more time, but also afford you a greater capacity for learning.
Those results are material prospects — really eye-opening stuff. Thus, to my own ends of saving time, I decided to attack this problem head-on.
The signal through the noise
Every time I read long-form, I’m amazed at how low the signal-to-noise ratio is. In fact, I analyzed my own consumption patterns and found that in every article worth reading only ~10% of its text is pertinent!
When I read, I add highlights and notes to distinguish what’s important from what’s not. That’s how I learn, since it’s the best way for me to retain knowledge. Furthermore, those annotations on each article always provide a concise summary of the full text. So, I compared the wordcount of my annotations to the wordcount of their source texts, and my analysis revealed that the signal-to-noise ratio is consistently around 1 : 7 (a 14% yield).
The ratio was even worse when I expanded my analysis to richer forms of media. For example, I found that my signal-to-noise ratio for audio podcasts is only 1 : 12 (an 8% yield) and video is a mere 1 : 18 (5.5% yield). In other words, if I want to watch a 60-minute lecture on YouTube, I’m committed to a full hour, even though it can be summarized for me in under 3½ minutes!
That’s a lot of extra time I’d love to recapture — no, I need to recapture! I had stumbled upon something, so I kept going down that rabbit hole…
All signal. No noise.
Believe it or not, I’m not the only one who highlights and takes notes. It turns out that a lot of other people annotate content the way I do: 80% of us highlight text; 55% of us comment; and 78% of us read those comments. Eureka! The solution seemed obvious to me:
“Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Annotation and summarization are the perfect complements to hack the content consumer’s experience. There are all of these people annotating all of this content. If we were able to crowdsource those annotations, we could provide an entire community with summaries that save them a lot of time!
Now that’s modern media: leveraging Web 2.0 capabilities toward an experience that facilitates modern consumers’ daily lives — instead of encumbering them with more noise.
It feels like the right solution too. Abstinence never felt like an appropriate reaction to the media glut. We live in a new golden age of information, where knowledge is open, free, and abundant. While it’s unhealthy to overindulge, it’s also wasteful to abstain. If you’re not growing, you’re dying. Plus, for all the good and bad that come with the information economy, the net benefits are appreciable.
That’s the genesis of Annotote, an app that lets you annotate any webpage, and your annotations contribute to content summaries that help the whole network enjoy. Considering my motivation at the outset, launching Annotote has been a bit of a twist-of-fate, but now there’s a modern media experience that’s ergonomic for today’s digitally-native content consumers.
If you don’t want to waste a lot of your time with all of the news and research you need, try Annotote anytime you read, and get straight to the point.
Annotote is the most frictionless way to get informed and inform others. For all the knowledge you need, every time you read. Leave your mark >>>
