Why are short videos bad for learning?

An essay version of the video is below – not just a transcript but a text that I’ve rewritten thoroughly to work as text. As is an audio version. You can subscribe to the audio-only unlisted podcast feed here if audio is more your speed.

Overview #

In this opinion piece – very much my opinion based on my experience and practice, not on academic studies – I explain one reason why short videos, such as what you get on TikTok, are bad for learning and information.

Did I mention that this is my opinion? Well it is. Don’t go all “well, that’s just your opinion, man”. I already told you so. And the same goes for the academics who suddenly find themselves filled with the urge to debate me on how montage or Tarkovsky have been understood in academic writing over the years.

In. My. Opinion.

Video #

Audio #

Why are short videos bad for learning?

Download audio

The TikTok Problem #

TikTok and its copycats have come to define how much of our societies consume information. The information that reaches us is bounded by the nature of the media that convey it.

By emphasising dubious theories that misrepresent neuroplasticity and “brain changes” we’ve managed to downplay that these platforms are doing exactly what they’re designed to do. Their form and design direct how we experience “facts” and how we learn.

I like to blame the Russians.

Not the current lot. Older Russians.

Though, if I’m to be fair, they more described the problem than caused it directly.

Specifically, I tend to blame Eisenstein and Tarkovsky.

Eisenstein was one of the early pioneers of cinema and was the first major filmmaker to come out of Russia in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet revolution.

His contribution was the concept of the “montage”. As legend would have it – probably untrue and apocryphal, but it’s a good story – early Soviet filmmakers struggled with shortages. That meant that they had a harder time of constructing films using the method that had been the norm in early cinema: a series of long takes spliced together, as you would if you were recording a play. They had to work with scraps of film.

So, as legend has it, they resorted to splicing together short bits of film and discovered that spliced end result worked very differently.

As he described the concept in his book (I think, it’s been twenty years since I read it, so I’m probably both misremembering and paraphrasing it badly):

If you record a long take of a man walking to a dinner table, looking down at the food, and licking his lips, you are very directly telling the viewer that the man is hungry and is about to eat.

But if you edit together a shot of the man entering a room, a close-up of food on the table, and a close-up of his face as he licks his lips, you are giving the viewer the impression of the same without actually showing it. You never actually visually show the man responding to the food one the screen at the same time. And if you change the shot of the food to the shot of another person, you transform the impression into a sexual one. Same core elements and shots, but because you aren’t directly telling the story visually – you’re implying it – you can transform the impression just by changing one shot.

The meaning, the scene, and the whole is constructed in the mind of the viewer without having to go through the effort of doing the thing itself on screen.

This is labour-saving, but it also means you can tell the story without having to show the story in detail.

The counterpoint to this approach came from another Russian – Tarkovsky – who made Solaris and Stalker and quite a few other movies. He believed that the montage was a bit of a deception. (Again, paraphrasing as it’s been almost two decades since I read his book as well.)

He saw the strength of film as being its time-based nature. It could show you time unfold, actions taking place over time, all on a large screen with detail and resolution that gave you the feeling of being there – gave you the sen