The Accelerated Eye

What if speed were not the enemy of culture, but the instrument of a new form of sensitive intelligence? A radical reappropriation of our right to the work that disrupts established cultural hierarchies.

Acceleration as an act of creation: moving beyond the myth of attention deficit

Accelerated viewing, this now common practice, especially among younger generations, which allows consuming content at 1.25x, 1.5x or even 2x their normal speed, is too often reduced to a symptom of our era, supposedly sick with speed and inattention. Young people are accused of constant channel-surfing and inability to concentrate. This reading is, in my view, erroneous: it’s perfectly fine to watch films, series, news or other “content” at accelerated speed; it’s not an attention deficit, it’s on the contrary a demand for quality content. I will try to demonstrate why.

This demand manifests through a subtle and nuanced practice. The viewer who accelerates doesn’t do so uniformly, but sculpts their experience in real time: at times, one chooses to return to normal speed when sensing they’re facing a masterpiece moment that interests them. It’s an intimate navigation through the flow, a dance of the mind with images, where each speed change becomes a critical act, an aesthetic decision. 59% of Gen Z members watch longer versions of videos they discover on short video apps, demonstrating that far from being prisoners of short formats, they navigate with agility between different temporalities. And moreover, within certain videos created by influencers, there can be moments of speech acceleration; they anticipate the acceleration their viewers would make.

Acceleration is therefore not an escape but a quest, that of moments of grace, of flashes that justify returning to “normal” speed. It means recognizing that not every work is uniformly dense, that the rhythm imposed by the creator is not necessarily the optimal rhythm for each viewer. This has, in my opinion, an excellent cognitive impact, contrary to what we’re told. This cognitive agility, this ability to modulate one’s reception according to felt interest, develops a form of critical intelligence that previous generations, subjected to the diktat of the single rhythm of theatrical projection or television broadcast, could not develop in the same way.

From passive consumption to co-creation: affirming cultural rights

This practice of acceleration is part of a broader movement of cultural reappropriation that finds its theoretical foundation in cultural rights, as stated in the Fribourg Declaration of 2007. Cultural rights aim to guarantee everyone the freedom to live their cultural identity, understood as “the set of cultural references by which a person, alone or in common, defines themselves, constitutes themselves, communicates and intends to be recognized in their dignity. Viewing acceleration, in this sense, is not a degradation of the work but a modality of its appropriation, a concrete exercise of the right to ”participate in cultural life" recognized by Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The viewer who accelerates affirms their right to interact with art on their own terms, to not be a simple receptacle for the artist’s vision, but a co-creator of their aesthetic experience. Article 5 of the Fribourg Declaration guarantees freedom of expression in a particular language and the right to “pursue a way of life associated with the valorization of one’s cultural resources”. By extension, why not recognize the right to pursue a viewing mode associated with the valorization of one’s temporal and cognitive resources?

The work is no longer a sacred and untouchable object, but living material, open to reinterpretation, to recreation, and that’s for the better. Moreover, the trailer for Jean-Luc Godard’s film “Film Socialisme” (2010) was the entire film (1h40) accelerated into 2 minutes, like a thumb to the nose. Jean-Luc Godard would certainly have loved for viewers to be free to watch his films at whatever speed they want. Why would he have loved it? Because he knew that people would see something other than what he had put in himself, and that’s precisely the power of art, its recreation by viewers. This vision recognizes that the work only exists fully in its encounter with an active, creative public that appropriates and transforms it.

The intelligence of speed: toward a new media literacy

Viewing acceleration constitutes an act of media and information education through practice. It develops specific cognitive skills: the ability to quickly evaluate the informational density of content, to hierarchize narrative elements, to identify key moments of a work. Nearly two-thirds of Gen Z send messages on social networks about series or video content. During their viewing, 60% simultaneously talk with their friends. This multitasking practice is not dispersion but an augmentation of the viewing experience through real-time sharing and commentary. On this subject, read the article « The reinvention of collective cinema sessions on TikTok ».

The viewer becomes their own programmer, their own editor, exercising instant curation of content. This practice is part of a broader media ecosystem where 15-24 year-olds master the art of composing their à la carte usage. They very often watch TV programs on catch-up, notably reality TV shows and suspenseful genres encouraging “binge-watching.” Acceleration is just one tool among others in this toolkit of active reception.

This cognitive agility, far from making us stupid, makes us more intelligent, more conscious of the value of our time and attention. As I wrote in « Cloud of nuanced screens »: on a phone, one is exposed to a greater diversity of activities, interactions and content, and this at a greater speed. This requires greater cerebral agility, which can be hastily qualified as attention deficit or superficiality. But in purely objective terms, the brain is solicited by more information than before, and it has never been scientifically proven that this reduces intelligence.

Artist resistance: between domination and sharing

Faced with these new practices, the artistic world is quite divided. On one side, creators who are offended, seeing in acceleration a profanation of their work. Netflix faced controversy when developing a player allowing accelerated viewing of its programs, accused by certain artists of damaging the integrity of works. On the other, artists who understand that art lives in its reappropriation by the public.

Artists who want people to “respect” their work haven’t understood what art is, they’ve just understood what domination and vanity are. The artist who demands a single mode of reception, who refuses any creative appropriation of their work, remains prisoner of an outdated vision of art, based on symbolic domination and not on sharing.

True artistic creation accepts, even celebrates, the multiplicity of readings and appropriations. It recognizes that once delivered to the public, the work no longer belongs to it entirely. It lives its own life in the consciousnesses and practices of those who receive it. Acceleration, deceleration, cutting, remixing, commentary, parody, all these practices participate in the cultural life of the work, in its social and historical circulation, in its real impact on imaginaries.

For a cultural policy of trust and accompaniment

Cultural institutions, inheritors of a vertical and paternalistic model of cultural democratization, struggle to integrate these new practices. They often remain prisoners of a vision where the public must be “educated” in good reception practices, where mediation consists of translating legitimate knowledge for supposedly ignorant publics. Cultural rights must not be thought of as a limit to cultural policies, but as a foundation requiring the implementation of policies that respond to many concerns.

The digital revolution has made us all producers and distributors of content, shifting the center of gravity of culture from institution to individual. Cultural policies must acknowledge this paradigm shift and move from a logic of supply to a logic of accompanying practices. Attentional changes would have a superb impact, as long as people’s cultural rights are respected, because they no longer accept being bored by bad shows. I know it’s a bit brutal, but I’m pointing to a reality that the cultural sector struggles to admit: a significant part of subsidized artistic production doesn’t find its audience not due to lack of education of the latter, but due to lack of real interest in audiences on the part of artists and institutions. There is no address. The real demand is in interest for the people we’re addressing. So it’s very good that viewers are no longer duped, because they have more knowledge than before.

Rethinking mediation: from magistracy to exchange

This transformation implies radically rethinking cultural mediation. It’s no longer about unilateral translation of legitimate knowledge, but about dialogue, sharing experiences and know-how. The observation mission must enable making common culture from different referentials, recognizing the diversity of cultural approaches and practices.

It’s about creating spaces of trust where audiences can express their tastes, their rejections, their ways of doing, without being judged. It’s by sincerely taking interest in these “uses,” including acceleration, zapping, multitasking, that cultural institutions can rebuild links with citizens and reaffirm their relevance. Cultural mediators must learn to value these skills developed by audiences: transmedia navigation, personal curation, creation of interpretation communities.

The challenge is to build a true cultural democracy, where each person is recognized in their capacity to contribute to collective cultural life. For its promoters, cultural rights aim to guarantee everyone the freedom to live their cultural identity, understood as “the set of cultural references by which a person, alone or in common, defines themselves, constitutes themselves, communicates and intends to be recognized in their dignity”. This requires a profound questioning of cultural hierarchies and authority postures.

The urgency of a new alliance: working with collective intelligence

The artist, like the institution, must learn to “work with,” to compose with collective intelligence, to see in these emerging practices not a threat, but an opportunity to reinvent art and culture. The data is eloquent: More than half of 15-24 year-olds visit video and cinema sites and applications daily (55.9% versus 37.5% for the general population). This generation is not breaking with culture, it’s redefining the modalities of access and practice.

Creators who manage to embrace this transformation, who accept seeing their works live differently in audience practices, who understand that acceleration can be a form of homage—we only accelerate what we want to see to the end—those will find engaged, creative, faithful audiences. The others will remain prisoners in their ivory tower, lamenting the decadence of modern times while progressively losing their social relevance.

The future belongs to a culture of remix, appropriation, creative transformation. A culture where the viewer is no longer passive but active, where the work is no longer closed but open, where speed is no longer enemy but ally of depth. It’s this culture that we must build together, artists and audiences reconciled in a new creative alliance.

Toward an ecology of chosen attention

Viewing acceleration is ultimately just a symptom of a deeper transformation: the emergence of a new ecology of attention where everyone becomes an active manager of their cognitive and temporal resources. Yes, our media space is saturated with content, young people spend about 4.7 hours per day watching long formats, so the ability to modulate one’s reception speed becomes a cultural survival skill.

This practice forcefully affirms that our time has value, that our attention is precious, and that we have the right to invest it according to our own terms. It constitutes a form of resistance to the attention economy that seeks to capture us, retain us, consume us. By accelerating, we regain control, we affirm our sovereignty over our cultural experience.

Cultural institutions and creators who manage to recognize and value this new form of sensitive intelligence, who accept seeing in acceleration not a degradation but a legitimate modality of aesthetic experience, those will be the artisans of a truly democratic, inclusive and living culture. Because as the Fribourg Declaration reminds us, this Declaration is entrusted to persons, communities, institutions and organizations who intend to participate in the development of the rights, freedoms and responsibilities it enunciates. The accelerated eye is not the degraded eye: it’s the augmented eye, the critical eye, the creative eye. It’s the eye of our time.