Dopamine Addiction and America’s Youth
Last week, we focused on the relationship between humans and their technology and how humans may not even realize the full impact technology can have on them. This week I am going to talk about our widespread usage on these apps like Instagram or TikTok that feature “short form content” like Instagram Reels or short TikTok videos. These short-form videos have grown throughout the world very quickly, and people are stuck to watching them like it’s an addiction. I have had the chance to do a lot of research on this topic because I am a victim of it myself. It can be classified as a short-term dopamine addiction. These videos bring mental stimulation to the users and cause dopamine releases in the brain that cause users to want to continue to scroll through these videos to get that dopamine hit again. It can be alarming for users when they sit down to watch a few videos and then all of a sudden, they look at the time and they have been scrolling for two to three hours or more. TikTok now has over 138 million active users in the US alone, and on average, those users spend 95 minutes on the app a day. It’s truly shocking to imagine how much elapsed time is between all users every day. Years worth of time is being lost every day from people watching video on top of video, that they will forget about not even 10 minutes after shutting their phone off.
While short videos like this have been around for a long time, it is TikTok that really got everyone hooked on these videos, and it has spread from platform to platform ever since. Now there are social media services that have nothing to do with short-form content that have these services, like Snapchat, which is an app for sending pictures and videos to friends and group chats. Users now have the ability to create public profiles and post these short videos on Snapchat, where they can be found on the “Discover page”. This was a new feature added around the same time that TikTok was released in the US.
The way that short-term dopamine addiction has spread throughout the internet and throughout the country is seriously alarming to me. Not only is it effecting the general population, it is strongly impacting the youth as well. Children all over the country and the world are getting hooked on these videos and begging their parents for their devices so they can watch endless TikToks. I don’t think children growing up with these dopamine addictions are going to benefit from this long-term, and I am interested to see the impact there will be for our currently youngest generation.
