I sometimes lose track of what I’m listening to, I start thinking over it in a way which almost drowns out the track. I might make a note to follow up a point from the audiobook but I don’t get to it for days by which point the intellectual urge has vanished and I can’t remember why I thought this was important. In this sense audiobooks seem like a more unreliable form of engagement.
Carrigan, M. (2021, October 11). Audiobook listening as scholarship. Mark Carrigan. https://markcarrigan.net/2021/10/11/are-audiobooks-a-more-shallow-form-of-engagement/
I agree with everything in this post; I want to listen to more academic work in audio formats but find the process of extracting useful information to be quite unsatisfying.
Either I find my attention drifting, or I’m switching between apps to try and capture the essence of something I want to come back to later.
I’m hoping that things like Momento help get us closer to the ability to capture information from audio sources, but this would need to be built into ebook readers or the operating system itself, in order to be more broadly useful.
It’d also need to be more reliable with respect to the quality of the machine learning transcription. At the moment it’s just usable, and requires a bit of interpretation. But it’s a lot more useful than having to take out my phone every time I need to take a note on what I’m listening to.