I have noticed that people have a general aversion to things that have context chains in them, meaning that the thing is composed of various sections and the understanding of each section depends on your understanding of sections before it. So anywhere in between you slip up, you will not be able to interact with the material that comes up ahead properly.
And the lesser the requirement or presence of context chains in a media, the more popular they are or more accessed by people they are.
For example, you can look at stand-up comedy where the show is not only independent of other media where you don’t have to know anything, but it is also independent of itself. Even if you skip the first 10 minutes, the other jokes are still going to hit and land. Thus, stand-up shows are accessed by many.
Same with motivational things. You don’t need to read the entirety of Plato’s Republic to have stuff from it stick with you. Even a quote in isolation can just be effective too.
Another form of this can be seen in the rise of short form content, where each piece of content is independent of the other and they are simple enough that even if you skip a few moments of the reel, the rest is easily understandable. Or if you did skip, maybe you can just rewatch it. The timing investment is too low.
On the opposite hand, we have technical textbooks where the textbook itself won’t be accessible to you unless you have read the prerequisite material. And even in the book itself, you won’t understand shit in the later part if you didn’t understand the stuff at the start.
This is because our brain is trying to conserve resources. It tries to get the maximum out of the resources it spends. So if you’re going to read something, it calculates that, hey, if I zone out in the middle, will this thing still be worth it?
And for things like textbooks, research papers, or anything hard, it’s no. I think that is why when we are dealing with things with context change, our brain just feels so tired. That is stress testing this resource investment: if at the start I zone out, I am not able to get this in my head. What happens if I lock in for the first four or five chapters and then zone out? My whole investment would be gone.
So why not just stress test at the start only?
And research also backs this up. People who are uncertain about material tend to adopt avoidant strategies because the uncertainty itself is draining.
So when you are creating content which you want to have mass appeal, which you want maximum engagement with, which you want to be circulated around masses of people, it makes little sense to have a high amount of context tape, to have context chains inside it because it will just make it unappealing to people.
For content, the more modular it is, the more independent it is, the better.
The start of the video, the first five seconds make up for the majority of the interactions your post will have. It also determines the retention of your video.
So we also have to make sure that in the first five seconds you don’t flag people the wrong way, that hey, this thing has a lot of context debt.
It would be better if there is some kind of pattern break, some kind of anticipation, some anthropomorphization of concept at hand, or something human in the start that everyone universally gets.