KEEP IT SHORT, DUDE

I just came home from the studio where we were recording an education video for our students.

I made a speech. I thought it was fantastic. I liked myself. I liked how thorough, detailed and descriptive I was. I thought I looked very intellectual and I thought everyone is going to love it. Then Cian burst my bubble. He said, ‘Oleg, you speak too slow, and you speak for too long. You give too many details and you go too deep. People who are going to see this video have an extremely short attention span. If your phrase is longer than 10 seconds, they’ll click on something else. Sign of our times, dude, sorry…. ‘. 

I thought for a moment and I had to agree. Recently I had someone commenting on my blog who said the same thing. He said, ‘If I were you, I’d keep it under 500 words, otherwise people will get tired and bored’. He is right. We live in a world of clicks now. Everything is readily accessible, you can have thousands of songs and thousands of books in your phone…….so instead of reading and listening, you end up flicking through everything and not actually getting any substance from anything. Of course you don’t retain any information and why would you need to? You just bookmark something and then come back. But the thing is, you never do. 

When I was a kid and I needed to read something, I’d have to order the book first, wait for a week, then walk to the library, get it, touch it, feel it, smell it, put it on a table, open it, go through pages one by one….and you know what? I still remember everything I read. If I read anything from the screen, I don’t. 

I don’t get much enjoyment from listening to MP3 files on my computer. On my birthday I got a present. I got a turntable from a very dear friend of mine. She couldn’t give me a better present. I put records on it using my hands (!!!). They are old and scratchy, but it sounds like Heaven. It sounds real.

‘We are Neanderthal people’, says my friend Misha. He is ancient. He reads real books.

Anyway. I am Neanderthal and I am also a hypocrite as I’m using a computer to print this, and when I receive a comment on this post, I am going to read it on the screen. 

And you know what? I kept it under 500 words.

So….. be nice.