Out of the Software Crisis

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  Why are short videos bad for learning? 17.09.2026 20นาที

  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…
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  Getting out of your own way when making video 14.09.2026 9นาที

  Overview # Essay version of the video is below. You can also listen to the audio-only podcast version and subscribe to the unlisted podcast feed here if audio is more your speed. How do you get out of your own way when making videos or media? Download audio Let it be messy! # How do you get out of your own way when you’re trying to make media? It isn’t easy. If you aren’t used to it – if, for example, text is your primary medium – this shit is quite hard. I don’t know how many takes I’ve tried, or how often I’ve recorded videos only to find them unusable. This isn’t even my first attempt at this particular YouTube channel and starting something here. Video is not easy. There’s a reason why it often requires an entire crew for it to look good. There are people who find video to be an easy fit to how they think. They process the world using vlogs and “tic tocs”, much as I process my experience of the world using text. Text is how I think. I write even when I don’t have to – even when it’s not a part of an overall business or freelancing strategy. Video is quite unnatural to me, and it’s taken me a while to figure out a process that I don’t completely hate. Even so, I threw away a couple (or a dozen) of videos because they didn’t work out. The question for this essay is: how do you get a get out of your own way when you’re trying to do something that’s new, that doesn’t fit your normal mode of thinking? When you’re working in a format that doesn’t work with how you usually think? The best advice I got was a little bit too simple, but works overall. ‘Just let it be messy!’ This actually goes back to when I was teaching twenty years ago. If you don’t know my background, I have worked at the crossroads between technology, publishing, and media for twenty-five years. So I have this background where I’m aware of the – not just the technical side or the practice, but also the theoretical context. It doesn’t help! It doesn’t make this easier. Doesn’t make sitting in front of a camera and, well, avoiding an anxiety attack any easier. For some reason I don’t mind recording audio as much. I can handle recording and even the sound of my own voice, but as soon as I’m on camera it gets a bit more stressful. The core problem I’m facing is that as a consumer, as a reader, or watcher of video, I have taste. I have skills as a consumer. It’s one of the reasons why, if you didn’t start writing regularly when you were young, and try to start writing later on when you’re an adult, one of the things that gets in your way, is that you actually have a well-honed assessment of what kind of writing you like. That gets in your own way because you can tell as soon as you start writing that you aren’t delivering the same quality or the same structure. Your writing isn’t convincing like the writing you prefer as a reader. So this mismatch between your skills as a reader and skills as a writer can cause a sort of mental roadblock. This applies to most creative fields – design, photography, and so on. If you have got an eye, but you don’t have the hand-to-eye coordination or the skills to create a composition, you’re going to have a hard time starting. I actually worked for a very brief period of time in TV. And I went through the earliest version of what later became Iceland’s film school. I helped many work on video and I can tell that what I’m making now isn’t as good as I’d like, which might confuse some because they look at it and go: That’s fine. It’s at least as good as the other nonsense I watch. This is why I should just get out of my way and let things be messy. I’m going to try and not obsess about that slight noise disturbance that I keep hearing in the audio setup that makes me paranoid and worried that something in all of this is cau…