Longform Podcast #361: Ken Burns
https://longform.org/posts/longform-podcast-361-ken-burns
https://media.simplecast.com/episodes/audio/309328/Ken_Burns_Full_Episode_Edit_2.mp3
The other part of your question is really addressed by the fact that despite all of this stuff we still remain superficial.
You’re gonna have all these channels, therefore we have all these in-depth news stuff. Nothing’s in depth. Nothing’s in depth.
We have a million places, 10 millions, 15, I don’t know, places where you can go and find stuff on the internet and nothing’s in depth.
So what I tried to do is to stay wedded to the long form, to be disciplined enough to understand that all meaning accrues in duration, that the work you’re proudest of, the work I’m proudest form, the relationship we both care the most about have benefited from our sustained attention. I’d rather be the tortoise than the hare in Aesop’s fable.
And it takes a lot of discipline not to take off and run but to stop and say you know what, it’s gonna take me eight and half years to do Country Music, it’s going to take me ten and half years to do Vietnam.
(...) we’re now in an age where there is a tsunami of information, it’s breaking over us like a tidal wave, people are drowning. And they are starved for curation.
So what people do is - we call it ’binging’ as if it was some guilty pleasure. No no no! We are binging because we are making choices to submit to someone’s narrative story, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, that will save us from the cacophony of events that are happening.
