The journalist Miguel Ángel Bastenier one day asked his students to write a brief about the Second World War. The struggle of the Axis and the Allies condensed into a single paragraph. It was a lesson in synthesis: everything is infinitely summarizable. 200 words of global conflict can be left in two lines. In a tweet. Bastenier himself defined this genre as “the brief of the brief, the complete, clear and simple roasting of what we want to say.”
Bastenier passed away in 2017. He didn’t see the rise of TikTok, in a sense the shortened version of YouTube. 20-second videos that have replaced what was already a miniature piece of the traditional television format. Nothing is safe from being summarized. In fact, new “digital impatients” have already appeared for whom even a TikTok video seems too long.
Alimatu Sadia He is one of those people. People, in general, seem “heavy, very heavy” to him. She was upset that Tiktok extended the length of the videos, first to 3 minutes and then up to 10. She remembers thinking: “With such long videos we are done for.” One day she decided to take advantage of this frustration and started uploading Tiktok video summaries. She is now a content creator. She has 240,000 followers on the Chinese social network, and more than 300,000 on Instagram.
He doesn’t know the exact time he spends each day consuming videos on digital platforms: “I can’t tell you, but quite a bit. I don’t know if it’s normal, I think not.” To prepare the summaries, he chooses to listen to the content instead of watching it. “If you end up watching the video, it’s not the same as just listening to it. If you look at it, you are already lost. I get lost with the person, how he talks, with the things about him. That’s what’s engaging in many videos,” she says.
He does not consider himself impatient, but rather someone who is direct and efficient when communicating. This frankness has brought him problems on occasion: “I have a somewhat small circle of friends. I don’t like being with people and spending hours saying things that don’t interest anyone. “I can’t be talking to you if I have other things to do,” he laments. Likewise, he expects others to be concise with his problems before discussing them: “If you already have your complaints organized, tell me. If not, then you cry, you do all your things, and you come back.”
Summarize to make us smarter
The spirit summarizer It’s not completely new. In ancient times, epitomes were created, abbreviated versions of extensive works. In the Middle Ages florilegios and anthologies were compiled with essential parts of books. Before, summaries preserved and transmitted knowledge; Today they also combat information overload. In an era before YouTube, Google or Instagram, in Spain there was a website with excellent summaries: El Rincón del Vago.
Javier Castellanos founded this website in 1998, together with Miguel Ángel Rodero, a Computer Science fellow at the Pontifical University of Salamanca. One day they started to “mess around” and it occurred to them to make a page of notes and work. “On the library computers we started El Rincón del Vago, to encourage word of mouth,” Castellanos recalls. It quickly went from local to national and then to Latin America, reaching 2 million daily visits with a team of ten people. “The nice thing is that it was a student portal made by students,” he says.
The project marked the generation of young people between 20 and 30 years old and has become part of the pop culture of the early internet. Although it raised ethical questions, its impact reflected what was already happening in universities. Castellanos claims that dedicated teachers could discern whether a work was original or taken from the Internet. He defends a less rote model of education: “El Rincón del Vago was a disruption, as is Chat GPT. The same teachers who were afraid of our page are now afraid of Artificial Intelligence.”
Summarize because someone has to do it
With the development of the Internet, summary formats have multiplied. There are YouTube channels dedicated to recapping movies and series, such as I’ll sum it up for you like this, with almost 8 million subscribers. There are also summaries of any sports competition. Formats such as comedian Ángel Martín’s morning news programs save time by summarizing the day’s news. Websites and apps like Blinkist and getAbstract provide book summaries.
The creator of Saving Clickbaits, who prefers to remain anonymous, has shown that a lot of news can be explained in a single tweet. It is dedicated to summarizing and revealing the content of articles with misleading or sensational titles, known as clickbaits. “One day I was reading digital press and I realized the amount of clickbaits “I had a newspaper, I entered another and the same thing, and another, and another… and a little bit of bad temper I made the account and I started to destroy the ones I was finding on Twitter,” he says.
During his free time, he spends his time searching for “clickbait headlines.” “Easier and easier because, unfortunately, they are an invasion,” he laments. His account oscillates between denunciation and comedy. “Sometimes you read a headline and it seems like they want to play trivia; So, he answered with the correct answer and that’s it. But other times they are headlines that trivialize a death or deceive the reader by omitting the answer to the question posed, and there is a large part of the complaint.”
He assures that the success of his account is due to the fact that “no one likes to have their time wasted or to be taken for an idiot.” He sometimes receives requests to summarize news, but usually ignores them. It does not seek to discourage reading, especially “well-crafted articles that are worth reading and worth paying for.” “I try to select news stories whose advance response won’t keep you up at night,” he says. Bastenier already said it: “The clickbait It is not a debatable journalistic technique, it is a deception that would embarrass a professional. Information is not a riddle.”
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