The case for short-form content
Sixty seconds of slick and swift stories
The pan sizzled when I plopped in diced chicken into a sautéed mix of garlic, shallots, and chili. I rocked the pan back and forth to coat the meat with the seasoning before popping on the lid. I grabbed my phone and a video resumed. I watched the food influencer add soy sauce to the half-cooked dish, so I pressed pause and did the same.
Short-form content like Instagram reels, TikTok, and YouTube shorts receive a lot of flak for its snippy lengths and fast, jump-cut edits. The 60-second videos are the culprit for everyone’s short attention span, they say. To fully retain information like the pre-internet days, everyone should take their foot off the accelerator and slow down. That means watching a docuseries about food waste, immersing themselves in an A24 movie, and flipping through the paperback pages of Pachinko. None of this short vertical clips stuff.
But concise delivery of information is effective. We do it at work. Executive summaries precede every report. One-page resumés. Meeting minutes that have action points summarized at the top. My family members consumed bite-sized content before it was cool, too. My grandmother subscribed to Our Daily Bread, a daily bible read and reflection journal, and my mother has a copy of Paulo Coelho’s yearly almanacs on her bedside table.
Short-form content makes sense. The recipe I was following was delivered in a 60-second video, not 60 minutes.
Content, when condensed to its essence, saves me time. Prior to the internet, some content was slotted in to fill in a set duration block. A personal finance book, for example, just needed to say “spend less than you earn”. But instead, publishers wanted a 20-chapter book. So off the authors went. Same goes with news. The most important headlines can be compressed into a 7-minute segment. But instead, networks create filler content like wild boar sightings to fill up the hour. The internet has upended the need for standard durations. TV shows like The Last of Us no longer needed to fit into a 45-minute container. They were as long or as short as they needed to be.
The true problem with short-form content isn’t its length. It’s the way we consume it, by binging in ravenous volumes. In other words: it’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.
A single 60-second video on an Excel pivot table hack is great if I put down my phone and test it out. If I allow time to put the information to use, that 60-second video would have been beneficial. But we don’t stop consuming after just one video. I’ve heard that TikTok viewing sessions could be 90 minutes or longer. That’s about 100 ideas consumed in one sitting.
It’s so easy to get sucked in. The world’s brightest minds devise mechanisms to keep us mortals virtually engaged for as long as possible. It’s no surprise that we stay locked in. But lately, I’ve been feeling overwhelmed by the barrage of information that comes my way. My friends love sending me reels of meme-worthy moments, cute clips of sausage dogs, and yes - recipes. When I open my Instagram DMs, I see a slew of bold messages waiting for my thumbs to tap them open. Instead, I get paralyzed. I want to respond to every meme but it’s too much. So I close the app.
I still love short-form content, but I know it comes hand-in-hand with the perils of binging. There’s not much I can do to disable the Algorithm, so I’ve introduced some guardrails for myself. Like having off-phone hours. And introducing a 6-second intervention screen before opening up Instagram. And instead of opening up my social media app to look at recipes, I’d copy the ingredients and instructions into my notes app to refer to instead.
Now, if only there was a way to deliver this essay in a 60-second video…
Thank you to friends who spared more than 60 seconds for this essay: , , , , and .
Update log:
🎨 Art book progress: I narrowed down 527 sketches into 68 images. Time to get onto editing the photos.
📹 Read this article about kids of influencer parents. We really grew up with tech without much thought of the consequences.
⚰️ Another haunting article on an atheist chaplain and a death row inmate’s final hours. This reminds me of a lot of
’s work covering humanism.📖 Reading A Little Life (19% completed) is making me feel very contemplative in a depresso espresso way. A lot of Jude’s inner dialogues resembled my own about half a decade ago. It’s eerie to read it now.
🖼️ I’m making good progress (I think) on my digital art class. I’m proud of what I can do despite picking up the software only last week/month kind of? I always thought that digital was so intimidating. But now it seems achievable.
💼 Did my personal performance review at work. Now for my manager to evaluate my performance and rate me for the past financial year.
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I think about this every time yet another author writes a book that could have been a blog post. Or a series of tweets or something. I do think there is value in getting to essence of ideas.
But I have to disagree that the TikTok type short form content encourages that. Instead it encourages the most interesting 60 seconds. If it is information dense I am not sure if it's going to get the algorithmic vote of approval. Also, I wonder how many people actually use this short form content for actual information, when you need it rather than as entertainment couched as useful because it has a nugget of information in it.
That article about the kids of influencer parents is startling. I'm so glad I've never include photos, imagery, or details of my kids in my content. How dreadful for kids who are everywhere on the internet by their parents hand and have no way to take it back.