How TikTok is Ruining Your Attention Span
Inspiration: “Why You Should Quit Social Media” TED Talk, The Social Dilemma film
TikTok is addictive. Unlike other social media apps, TikTok becomes more addicting the more you use it. With the average video spanning only 15 seconds and an endless feed of entertaining content, TikTok’s become one of the most addicting apps ever created.
The more you scroll, the more addicting it gets.
TikTok’s main feed, the “For You” page, is powered by an algorithm that collects data on every video you watch.
The app tracks:
- How long you watch each video before scrolling
- How many times you rewatched the video
- If you comment or like the video
- If you click on the creator’s name and navigate to their page
- If you search through the comments
Essentially, TikTok tracks how each and every user engages with which kinds of content. As you interact with posts, the algorithm becomes more and more efficient at showing videos you’ll like. The “For You” page is updated in real-time, giving you videos more and more tailored to your interests within the same scrolling session. As a result, you stay glued to your phone as content becomes more and more interesting.
TikTok is endless.
On Instagram, when scrolling the home page, you’ll eventually scroll to some content you’ve already seen. At that point, most users leave the app to do something else. The Instagram feed is set up so that you see content from the people you follow, and once you’ve seen that, there’s nothing left to see (except “IG Reels”, Instagrams attempt to mimic TikTok, but I’ll save that for another article). On TikTok, most users scroll on the “For You” page instead of the “Following” page. This means that instead of viewing the posts from accounts you follow, you view posts from accounts that the algorithm has determined you’d engage with.
The algorithm optimizes for engagement, so the posts you see aren’t necessarily something you’re going to like. Instead, it’s something provoking or intriguing, not necessarily something you’d “like”. The catch? Unlike Instagram’s main feed page, the For You page is endless. This means you could scroll for 12 hours a day or more and never see a post you’ve already seen. As a result, this feature keeps users on their phone with ever-more-interesting content for hours at a time, creating one of the most powerful social media apps of all time.
Every time you see a video that you like, a rush of dopamine is released in your brain in a way that mimics the effects of drugs.
Since the TikTok algorithm is able to target each user with the specific content they’re interested in, nearly every post that comes on your page releases dopamine in your brain. As you scroll the “For You” page, your brain gets hit after hit of dopamine, the feel-good chemical in your brain. Once accustomed to this easy and fast source, your brain craves a frequent and quick hit. This chemical feel-good cycle reinforces itself, and can quickly lead to an addiction to TikTok as powerful as a drug addiction.
The addictive, quick-scrolling, feel-good nature of the For You page will diminish your ability to pay attention.
While you scroll and your brain releases quick hits of dopamine, you become increasingly impatient with any delay in gratification. If a post has a boring start, you’re likely to scroll past it quickly, craving that next hit of feel-good from the next post. At any lapse in entertainment, you can quickly scroll on, and since the entertainment is endless and the algorithm is forever improving, you become more and more accustomed to being entirely entranced. This short attention span leaks into your daily life, where at any time the present moment is a little too boring, we’re quick to whip out our phones to find the next hit of instant gratification.
If left unchecked, this constant craving for instant gratification will leave us addicted to our phones and other all-consuming entertainment.
Our attention spans will shorten, causing a domino effect of other issues:
- We won’t be able to engage in deep work requiring intense concentration
- We’ll spend less time face-to-face and more time tucked away with a screen
- We won’t be able to stay present in conversations with others, preventing us from forming close relationships
- We will develop a shorter fuse for everyday annoyances
- We won’t be able to enjoy a peaceful still moment
Before it is too late, we must recognize this danger and force ourselves to limit our screen time and scroll time, so we can return to our balanced state of quiet, steady presence.
