FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
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A podcast precis can’t replace real learning

A podcast precis can’t replace real learning

Benjamin Franklin once mused that “an investment in knowledge pays the best interest”, and with the rise in popularity of online audio programmes, it seems that China is entering a time when paying for knowledge is fast becoming a cultural norm.

With the relentless onslaught of information being delivered online or through smartphones, the hundreds of thousands of new books published every year and a daily diet of entertainment and news across social media, it seems that people need better ways to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Especially given our fragmented, fast-paced daily lives, in which most of our information consumption tends to happen on the go, such as the daily commute to work.
Tapping into this newfound demand, knowledge providers have seen a market for delivery of easily digestible information across a range of media.
As a result, they are compiling the content of popular books and mining news outlets, or taking complex subjects like psychology or business management and combining the information with their understanding and analysis to create marketable text, audio and video products.
For example, rush-hour scholars can, for just 4.99 yuan (Bt25), get supposedly profound analysis of books such as Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, or Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, just by listening to programmes that last from 20 minutes to an hour on an audio app called iget.
A survey of 2,001 people, conducted by China Youth Daily in July 2016, revealed that more than 63 per cent of those polled were willing to pay for curated information provided by these online services such as Ximalaya, iget and Zhihu.
According to consulting company iResearch, the value of the pay-for-knowledge market in China was around 4.9 billion yuan in 2017, and is predicted to top 23.5 billion yuan by 2020.
However, questions remain over the depth and quality of the information that someone can extract from a 20-minute audio file and whether it is an effective way of learning.
Zhang Wenjing, a researcher with Suning Institute of Finance, said in an article titled “Paying for Knowledge, Or Anxiety” that, besides other factors such as social development and people’s payment habits, the growth of the market is a direct result of people’s anxiety.
She makes a good case, especially since Luo Zhenyu, iget’s founder, proclaimed in 2016, when the pay for knowledge market was in its infancy, “I understand your anxiety for knowledge”.
“What we’re doing is giving those things that were once extremely expensive to everyone at a very low price, and with few barriers to entry,” he told the Fourth Internet Conference in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, in December.
According to industry reports, targeted users are middle class, aged 20 to 49 years old and mainly come from first- and second-tier cities.

Social consumption
However, according to Zhang, although these people are classified as middle class, many don’t identify with the categorisation because of the huge gap between their incomes, high housing prices and climbing living costs. 
This, Zhang noted, is what makes them anxious.
As China’s economy has grown in the past 38 years, so, too, have the spending habits of urban residents. People have gradually increased spending on things like education, entertainment, travel and culture.
When viewed through such a prism, it becomes easier to see how paying for knowledge has been able to ride the wave of changing attitudes in social consumption, Zhang wrote. 
“Modern Chinese society is changing so quickly that the knowledge acquired from textbooks becomes outdated very quickly,” she noted, “especially in fields such as online development and artificial intelligence”.
However, there are those who question the effectiveness of such methods of study, especially given their fragmented nature and the limited time frames involved.
In a bid to attract more users, some popular programmes have devolved into little more than anecdote-filled podcasts. They are entertaining, but rarely beneficial, said Li Ruyi, an online audio producer.
He said it is because “online knowledge providers tend to avoid their moral responsibilities as educators.” 
“Programmes online can actually provide a channel for education,” he said. 
“If people are not satisfied with their current school curriculum, the Internet actually gives people a chance to embark on an education more in line with their own ideas.” 
He  added that “we should pay more attention to our responsibilities as educators”.
Chiao Yuan-pu, a writer and music critic from Taiwan, agreed, suggesting that such programmes give people the impression that if they listen to the anecdotes and stories, then they will have an understanding of an operatic composition or a knowledge system in just several minutes.
“It’s just like in another country, an advertisement might claim that, with the help of a certain programme, customers can master the Chinese language in one hour,” he said.  “How can that be possible? We all know how complicated and profound the language is.”

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