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We are continuously exposed to endless content due to the globalization of the Internet and media. A vast digital library offering tutorials, courses, and entertainment of all kinds is at the reach of our fingertips, and we think that we can learn and consume everything we stumble upon on the web. However, we can feel our anxiety grow little by little to complete a course, watch the TV series that everyone hypes over, or listen to the podcast recommended by your best friend… and so, we realize that 24 hours in a day is not enough. In order to do all this and appease this neverending feeling, many people have turned to speedwatching.
The so-called speedwatching is a relatively new trend that Forbes Magazine defines as “consuming various audiovisual content using a much higher playback speed than natural.” While every age range practices it, younger people succumb to it more, those who belong to the digital native generations, the Millennials and Gen Z. Most of the time, people resort to this practice to consume more content in less time, for example, an online class or a TV series episode with a duration of one hour that they can reduce to 40 minutes.
The practice’s popularity started with YouTube, one of the first sites to implement this option, where all its videos have the alternative of watching at different paces, reaching up to twice the speed. Even YouTube’s product manager, Neal Mohan, revealed in 2022, “While many of our users love this feature, the speed is still not fast enough for some. We’ve even received requests to add 3x, 3.5x, and 4x playback speeds.” Moreover, YouTube claims its consumers save up to 900 years of video time daily by accelerating them. Other platforms joined in offering this option, including Netflix, WhatsApp, and Spotify, where users can control the speed of their voice messages and even listen to podcasts at up to three times their recorded speeds.
Although they do not have this function directly, another platform that encourages the rush of content consumption is TikTok, where the vast majority of videos last a minute or less. Also, it’s common to find songs playing faster than usual or people speaking rapidly to avoid making a long video. This way of presenting videos now seems normal due to our fast-paced world; we want everything delivered to us as fast as possible.
Besides its boost from our accelerated modern times, this practice was born from the anxiety people experience when they feel they are missing out on things (FOMO), where people want to keep up with the latest trends. Some young people even claim they do it because they cannot concentrate due to their reduced attention span, so they consume videos and audio of shorter duration. This practice seems the perfect solution to these problems.
Speedwatching saves time to finish online classes or other entertainment content faster and even boosts concentration by having to pay full attention and ignore distractions to try to grasp all the information. However, Sylvie Pérez, educational psychologist and lecturer at the Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), argues that this practice can be counterproductive because:
- It increases impatience: People’s patience can be severely affected by not receiving quick gratification; they give up the ambition to achieve goals.
- Low content comprehension: The overstimulation from seeing so many fast-paced images, sounds, and dialogues makes people overlook essential details, reducing their understanding of the medium.
- Passive brain: If speedwatching becomes a habit, the brain will become accustomed to receiving constant stimuli, making it more challenging to be attentive when receiving information at average speed. There could be a propensity for “us to become more primitive and only act on stimulus-response without information processing,” says Pérez.
- Decreased attention span: Sustaining attention is a voluntary skill young people develop over the years. Their attention span may stagnate as they get used to receiving information quickly: they cannot easily concentrate on content at a normal pace.
The professor also states that this phenomenon can be especially harmful for children and adolescents because they are still in a formative period in their attention, retention, comprehension, and memory capacities.
Speedwatching allows users more control over what they consume; however, social networks have also driven and normalized the acceleration of audiovisual content on our technological devices. Before delving into this practice, people should consider whether it is the right time to do it and be aware of its risks to avoid making it a habit. Do you make use of this feature? Would you consider this option to learn more in less time?
Translation by Daniel Wetta
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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