In the bizarre world of short-form video, nobody is allowed to take a breath | Adrian Chiles

I never thought I’d miss punctuation so much, but as the pauses on social media videos are cut to shreds, I wonder where the assault on our senses will end, writes Adrian Chiles

It’s not the worst thing about social media, but something dreadful is happening in short-form videos. At first I thought my phone or my broadband was on the blink. Then I assumed I was just unlucky, that this aberration was practised only by the creators of the very few videos I chanced to see. And now I realise that they all do it. It’s mad, it’s driving me mad, it’s going to drive us all mad. Or perhaps it’s just me. I’m the bonkers one, lost and alone in a world I no longer understand.

It’s the way these things are edited. The pauses between sentences, or even the pauses between clauses within sentences, are cut out. Each sentence clatters in to the next, so whoever is talking sounds as if they’ve lost control of their speech. Words tumble out of them in a frantically fast but disjointed torrentThis is my attempt to reproduce on the page how absurd it soundsI really can’t stand itIt’s a crime against civilised discourseIt’s both a symptom and a cause of madnessI never thought I’d miss punctuation and breaths this muchBut it turns out you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s goneTrue thatPreachOr whatever it is they sayI’ll stop now.

I’ll stop because it’s as exhausting to read as it is to listen to. It’s as if someone is punching out extracts of a dumbed-down version of Finnegans Wake. James Joyce must be turning in his grave. Or perhaps he’d approve. Who knows? I’ve spent the last week berating anyone I can find under the age of 30 who works in this field. Tellingly, when I first explain what I’m on about, they sound puzzled. It’s so normal to them that I need to jog their memories about the punctuation and pauses of the olden days. At which point they just shrug sadly and explain that if you don’t do it this way then nobody will watch past the first second. “You’ve got to edit the breaths out,” one creator told me, “to keep the pace up.” I get the need for pace, but why not just talk quicker? Another shrug. I ask her to check how much time is saved with the removal of each breath. She reckons each pause for breath is between 0.1 of a second and one whole second long. And out they must all come. I imagine all these rejected pauses gathered despondently somewhere in the digital ether.

As one of Britain’s leading scatterbrains, my own attention span is shamefully short, but I’m pretty sure I can hold my focus for more than one second between sentences. And here’s the thing: in real life nobody speaks like this. An audiobook played extra fast sounds ridiculous, but still feels more natural than this bonkers, de-breathed weirdness. I suppose the purpose is to communicate to the viewer that the creator knows their time is so precious they’re not going to waste any of it making them sit through whole seconds of tedious breathing.

When I first started at the BBC, I was surprised at how much time was spent “de-umming” recorded interviews, taking the ums and ahs out to make the interviewee sound more fluent. And a proper pain it was, too, splicing and sticking bits of quarter-inch tape together. Even without the faff of physical tape, taking out every breath must be soul-destroying. But somebody’s got to do it, even at the BBC. I clicked on a short video about Andy Burnham’s wife. Ready, steady, go: “What do we know about Andy Burnham’s wifeMarie-France van HeelThe pair met at Cambridge Uni …” and so on, for 47 (literally) breathless seconds. Sweetly though, the subtitles do feature punctuation. God bless them.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s brilliantly done. The shot often changes at the point where the breath once was. It’s an assault on the senses and no mistake. And if this is what you need to do to get anyone to engage, then so be it. But where does it end? The words are already pared down to a minimum; what’s next to go after the breaths? If we tolerate this, our sanity, or what’s left of it, will be next.

• Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist

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