I skimmed this article in about 20 seconds and then went back and read it more closely. I don't feel like I missed much on the first pass.
Sure you won't get the full literary experience skimming through War and Peace. But fluffy articles with a single tweet's worth of information content I can "speed read" just fine.
There's all kinds of different... "textures" of information.
Some things are extremely thick with information. Every few sentences, I might need to pause and think through all the implications and realizations that are revealed to me. In audio form, I'm rewinding or pausing, and consuming at <1x speed.
Other sources might spread the important details and facts around. I'm better served by speedreading / skimming / playing back at (>?)2x speed. This strains my short term memory less, letting me assemble the important bits into a broader, deeper understanding of the material, that can contextualize all those snippets in a way that makes it easier to commit to long term memory.
This can happen even with information dense material, in which case I'm better served by repeatedly skimming, than trying to do a single solid readthrough once.
And then there's the stuff that wasn't even worth skimming through once.
skip reading is perhaps a better name for it. I got the gist - speed reading doesn't work, saved myself a few minutes only skipping to the start of each paragraph.
Sure you won't get the full literary experience skimming through War and Peace. But fluffy articles with a single tweet's worth of information content I can "speed read" just fine.