You’re done with your homework. Due to the immense workload from school, you don’t have time to engage in any of your larger hobbies. So you decide to watch TikTok until you have to go to sleep. Or perhaps you’re in class and have finished your classwork, and need something to do until the class ends.
One of the defining tenants of the 2020s, and Generation Z as a whole, are short-form video platforms. Beginning with TikTok, most other social media platforms moved to similar functions quickly, spawning Instagram Reels, Youtube Shorts, and others.
“They’re really entertaining, and they help me to destress after school days,” senior Nylah Berkley said. “So it’s really nice to just be scrolling.”
Algorithmically determined videos are fed to their users, and the apps continuously learn from other data they collect. The advent of these formats has undeniably had a huge effect on our world. And to some, they aren’t positive effects.
“I think short-form content is detrimental to the development of younger generations,” senior James Park said. “It teaches them to seek short fixes for their attention spans. So whenever they have to pay prolonged attention to something, they’re too bored of it, and they can’t focus.”
Due to the wide reach of these apps, their algorithms are very powerful and influential, judging by the federal government’s repeated attempts to ban and regulate TikTok. Without the agency of the user to choose their videos, the information they communicate can’t be evaluated that critically. Contrary to the “echo chamber” model that sites such as Facebook and Twitter often employ (essentially allowing you to cultivate your own feed, full of content that you agree with), it could be said that short-form platforms often create the echo chamber for you.
“I think it wastes a lot of time,” senior Austin Deng said. “Shorts are just 60 seconds of something random, and then you move on to the next thing, and you can’t really think about what you just watched.”
The advancement of technology, particularly social media, has created practically an ocean of entertainment, and sometimes, it can feel easy to drown in it. To grab your attention, short videos are often designed to be as stimulating and abrasive as possible, which can create an exhausting feedback loop for your brain.
“Set time limits on your phone,” Berkley said. “Try not to doomscroll.”
As we live increasingly busier and more complicated lives, full of calendars, assignments, and appointments, short form content preys on the little moments in between, that boredom would have otherwise occupied.
“I think being bored is very useful for reflecting or just being present in the moment,” Deng said. “My opinion [on short form content] is generally negative. But sometimes I’m just bored and look through them.”
And since this technology is so unprecedented, the wider effects of it on our world have probably not been fully realized yet. Literacy, attention spans, and culture are all affected massively by the content we can consume.
“In the long term [I think there will be] just a general decline in educational ability,” Park said. “You’re already seeing it now. You see kids who lack basic reading comprehension or math skills.”
With the amount of impact these apps have, the ongoing discussions regarding the effects of these platforms are often linked to how to find a solution, if there is one.
“We could cry all we want about limits or social media or age restrictions, but the best solution is just to teach parents to keep better control of their kids,” Park said. “That is the simplest way. It requires a lot of effort, and I think a lot of people like to blame the short form content itself. That’s just a symptom, right? That really is the best solution, and even if it’s not what we want to hear. It’s what we owe to the next generation.”
