How the attention economy has us watching content at 2x speed

We are living in an attention economy where silence feels suspicious and slow pacing feels intolerable. Speed has become a coping mechanism, not just to consume more, but to avoid the discomfort of slowness itself. And because we multitask everything — watching while cooking, scrolling while listening, studying while streaming — speed feels necessary to keep up. What began as a quirky productivity hack has quietly become the dominant mode of consumption.

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Platforms know it

Playback speed once used to be a hidden guilty-pleasure setting. Now, it sits beside captions and pause settings — an elevated default. Platforms don’t question it, and podcasts casually recommend 1.5x like it’s the new baseline.

Case in point: YouTube. In a 2022 blog, the CEO said that the playback speed feature was used to speed up content 89 per cent of the time, and faster speeds allowed users to save an “average of over 900 years of video time per day”. Last year, YouTube allowed users to adjust speed on a more ‘granular level’. It introduced increments of 0.05 units instead of the earlier 0.25, so you can hit the sweet spot of fast-forwarded content. And if you want even faster speeds, you can watch content three times faster with a Premium subscription. Even subscription-only platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video offer this feature.

The message is clear: platforms don’t care if we savour content. They care if we finish it. Faster completion means more consumption, and more consumption means better metrics. When attention is an asset, views and watch hours become a marker of commercial success, bringing in advertising revenue and better data to feed their algorithms.

Before the 2x culture, binge culture had already trained us to consume endlessly. Speed was simply the next optimisation. And then came Reels, Shorts, and TikTok, which reprogrammed our dopamine systems entirely. These platforms were engineered for instant payoff, and they conditioned us to expect stimulation without delay. Anything longer than a few seconds suddenly felt dragged. When a 40-minute episode pauses to breathe, our brains revolt. The reflex is automatic: speed it up.

But there’s a cost

There are some advantages to watching content faster. You can finish a piece of content more quickly, or watch more in the same span. In fact, Dr Marcus Pearce, who teaches Cognitive Science at Queen Mary University of London, wrote in The Conversation that it can even help prevent your mind from wandering, and “sustain your attention and engagement for the entire duration”.

But there are downsides as well. Faster playback speeds may not deter our ability to understand the content, but they do reshape how our brains process information. We force our minds to absorb dialogue, visuals, and emotional cues at accelerated speeds. Pearce suggests that this can lead to “cognitive overload”. When we send too much information to our brain, it can exhaust our “working memory” (which stores incoming messages temporarily). This, in turn, can result in loss of information and inability to recall it later, as we are not giving the brain enough time to process working memory into long-term memory. The results, of course, vary for individuals with different capacities. For instance, the effects may be more magnified in older adults.

So why fast-forward?

Reddit threads today discuss why anything below 1.5x speed feels “slow”, and memes talk about wanting to 2x real-life conversations. A generation of youngsters who got used to watching pre-recorded lectures online during the Covid-19 pandemic have had to realise that they can’t fast-forward their professors in actual classrooms.

 

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A friend tells me that when he ‘speed-watches’ content, he feels a sense of “achievement”. “Finishing it fast feels like ticking off a task. It probably tricks my brain into thinking I am being productive. It’s strange, but sometimes 2x speed feels less like a convenience and more like a coping mechanism, like if I am not speeding through things, I am somehow wasting time.”

But there’s more to it. “It’s about calming this weird anxiety I have of missing out,” he adds. “I am always scared that if I slow down, something will happen and I won’t be there for it, or I will fall behind everyone else.”

This makes me wonder if we can ever quit speed-watching. The digital ecosystem is built to make us feel like we are falling behind. There’s endless content and endless chatter about that content. The 2x culture, then, is a survival tactic, a way to stay relevant in a world that updates by the second.

And when content becomes a checklist, do we risk making the watching experience emptier? The emotional beats that we fast-forward through are what give stories meaning. The silence before heartbreak, the breath before confession, the tension before a reveal flatten under double speed. And gradually, then, do we become people who struggle to sit with emotion at all?

Aashika is an intern at indianexpress.com