How quick and short content erodes our attention span
Quick reading
Once, the ingredients of bubble baths and shampoos served as quick reading material while sitting on the toilet, especially when you didn’t have a magazine or book nearby.
Over the years, smartphones have increasingly replaced quick reading and more in-depth reading, especially with the advent of social media.
Scrolling through a Facebook feed or watching a YouTube video has gradually become the way most people entertain themselves during idle moments—not just in the bathroom, but also when we’re forced to wait, like when we are in a waiting room when traveling, or when waiting for public transport, or while sitting on a bench, for example.
Idle moments
Those empty moments were once spent observing the surrounding world or exchanging a few words with the people around us. Now, they serve as an excuse to isolate us from the context we are in. Of course, sometimes it’s useful since we can use these moments to learn something, but exaggeration has led to a progressive detachment from reality, even in situations where it’s unnecessary.
With the arrival of TikTok, there was another “step forward” (in quotes) in this sense. The Chinese social network offers shorter content than what we were used to with a normal YouTube video, and it doesn’t let us choose what to watch. This makes users almost hypnotized by the series of videos they watch and easily scroll through, making the brain even more passive compared to watching longer, more engaging, but still chosen content.
TikTok and the attention threshold
The effect is almost the same as when the brain digresses while we are immersed in our thoughts, connecting one thought to another and yet another, until we completely lose coherence with the first thought. The passivity is similar to when watching infomercials or reality shows, where there is nothing to understand and we can only watch.
TikTok does roughly the same thing. You start with one video, and the following ones are not related, triggering in us a curiosity for novelty each time, only to quickly be exhausted: both due to the brevity of the videos and because the next video is not connected to the previous one, but also because, over time, our desire to explore new stimuli becomes a vicious cycle.
Of course, TikTok’s algorithm eventually learns what is preferable to show us to capture our attention, while still maintaining variety and inconsistency in the content.
All of this generates a sort of addiction that leads to a decrease in attention threshold in other areas as well. The stimulus of short, but continuous pleasure is reapplied in different contexts, like taking a pill, or rather, like a drug.
Although short content, even outside of TikTok, can often be easier to memorize because it is associated with a particular context, the redundancy of the approach used on this platform leads to other repercussions, such as some diseases, especially among younger people, like stress, depression, and even nervous tics.
The challenges
TikTok also became famous for its challenges aimed at encouraging users to create content on a specific theme. Initially, the early challenges involved simple dances and/or audio reproductions, but users started launching increasingly extreme challenges in order to go viral, such as ones where some people ingested medication to record the effects or ones where they held their breath until they passed out. Challenges that, in some cases, caused many users to lose their lives. And, of course, the victims are always the younger ones.
Time
TikTok has gradually stolen more and more of our attention, and if this trend persists, one might wonder if the attention span will eventually match the speed of thought.
It’s important to become aware of the loss of attention we’re experiencing and try to manage our time better. It’s much better to be aware of the things we like and seek them out voluntarily rather than be slaves to an algorithm that drags us incessantly from one stimulus to the next.
