Visual crack cocaine

TikTok, YT shorts, IG reels, etc. | 100 Days of Wonder #16

It seems 7-second TikTok videos are doing best nowadays. Not 4 seconds, not 10 seconds, but 7 seconds.

I wonder what this will mean for the generation right after me as well as the generation of my kids. Will their attention spans get even worse than they already are?

By the way, it’s not like I’m immune to this—as a millennial, I have known a time before the internet and social media (which I came to very late)—I notice a shortened attention span in myself too.

I have noticed I can bounce back to a longer attention span again, though. This month of December, for example, I’ve been heavily throttling my social media use. It’s resulted in being able to live in the present moment much better than the three or so months before that.

I have never installed TikTok (and don’t plan to), but I do see Youtube shorts being pushed into my Youtube feed more and more. I even clicked through it a handful of times, and oh my god, it’s just so clear to me it’s a drug.

The big social platforms are truly peddling a visual version of crack cocaine.

Especially teens and tweens seem to be devouring that content—hook ehm while they’re young, right? It’s probably no coincidence that the incidence of depression, loneliness, and suicidal thoughts is the highest it’s ever been in those age brackets. (Lockdowns didn’t help either.)

On the supply side of this scene are the creators of the content. The platforms make it so alluring for you to go along that you’d be crazy not to jump into that honeypot for all that sweet and cheap attention. But remember what happens when you fall into a honey pot?

You get stuck.

Your own way of making content or art will bow down to the will of the consumers and platforms. As a content creator or artist, it’s almost an act of deviance if you choose not to tag along.

But not all can resist the siren song of their 7-second video going viral.

So, like Odysseus, I try to plug my ears (don’t create an account for IG and TikTok) and tie myself to the mast (commit to creating mainly long-form content).

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Thanks for reading, everyone!

Cheers,

Jibran