Shortform Content

Lately, everybody and their mothers (literally) are fond of this new byte-size content consumption format commonly referred to as shortform content. Instagram, TikTok, X(formerly Twitter), Youtube Shorts are some of the common and most popular ones out there. But I feel this new “radical” way of consuming content might not be healthy.

The first I heard of short-form content was back in school, roughly 11 years ago. All of a sudden, people would send these extremely short yet hilarious videos with a Vine watermark on them. I was smitten by the creativity of these people(the term creators wasn’t common parlance back then), by how they were able to tell a story in a few seconds. During the next ten years, Snapchat mastered the “stories” concept which was later picked up by Facebook, Instagram and virtually every other social media application in existence. But I was never too drawn to social media, and thus a little out of loop on what was happening, especially with the shortform content craze.

Fast forward to 2022, I was reading Digital Minimalism, in which Cal Newport talks about the disadvantages of social media, and so thanks to frequency illusion, I found that shortform content is virtually everywhere. It has—primarily in the form of stories—spread like a plague in the past decade or so, especially with the newfound affordability and availability of smartphones and cheap internet. People of varying ages are hooked to their devices watching these short bursts of entertainment to keep themselves, well..entertained.

And I kinda understood why it was so appealing. It was simply convenient, and it wasn’t long before I found myself looking up information quickly. What’s the water to quinoa ratio while cooking or getting a form-check on a new exercise I want to try at the gym while I was in the gym. It was just too convenient and worthwhile. All of a sudden, I didn’t have to watch a whole video or read an entire article on a topic to find the information I was looking for in the moment. What’s not to like?

But I was astonished by the extent to which it spread and captured people’s attention, and took over their time. I was out on a walk recently and noticed a small kid, about 8-10 years old, sitting next to what I believed was a young full-time babysitter (quite common here in India). They both were sitting on a bench in the park, glued to their respective mobile phones and endlessly scrolling something that resembled Instagram stories or Youtube shorts, I’m not sure which. Now, I’m in no way a Luddite but that sight was extremely depressing. Yet another time, at a wedding, I noticed mothers thrusting a phone in each of their young children’s hands and then feeding them food. Upon some questioning, I was told that they just don’t eat without a phone anymore. These are not isolated incidents, these are just the ones I’m choosing to share. If you start to look, I’m sure you will easily find many more around you. All day everyday, as soon as someone has some time to kill, out comes the phone, and the scrolling begins. It has gotten to the point that people now do this without thinking, they pull out their phones at the slightest hint of boredom, their bodies and brains working like automatons.

It has been said time and time again that the brightest minds of our time are busy building applications which ensure that you spend as much time as realistically possible on your devices. The simple premise being: you spend more time on these apps, the apps learn more about you, show you more targeted adds and well…$$. So it’s no wonder that getting rid of this addiction is extremely hard, I’ve written about how I attempted to get over my problems with social media in the past. So this would explain why the problem is so rampant across all ages.

I wouldn’t have really blabbered about all of this if people were simply spending–better yet, wasting–their time on devices watching short videos. But that’s simply the tip of the iceberg imo. Last month, I was at a service center for my two-wheeler’s scheduled maintenance. Sitting next to me in the customer’s waiting area, was another customer, a middle aged gentleman. For a good 1 hour—and yes, I timed it—the individual spent scrolling through Instagram reels non-stop without earphones (that’s another discussion). I was fascinated by the sight and I couldn’t help but observing this man and the content he was watching(mostly because it was audible to the whole room). There was no coherence in the content he was watching, he was completely at the whim of the application’s algorithm. One moment, he was watching a funny animal video, and a provocative news byte, the next.

There are two problems with this. First, If you don’t choose the kind of content you want to consume, then you can seemingly easily mess up your state of mind. You could be sitting down with a hot cup of tea on a Sunday morning and the algorithm decides to serve you some depressing and aggressive content, how do you think it will affect you? Your head space is being governed by these apps, and unfortunately you don’t have a say in it. This is exactly what social media manipulation is. You pay the social media companies and the companies would make sure that content inspired by your ideology gets the front page for millions of people, enticing them, triggering them. As harmless as this sounds, a quick search will tell you how fatal this has been so far, and the untapped destructive potential this holds in our fragile society.

Second and the more pressing of the two problems is how it all impacts our intellect and rational thinking in the long run. Majority of people’s time is being spent mindlessly scrolling their feeds. Wishful thinking on my part but are there better uses of this time? Absolutely. Especially when you’re partaking in undirected consumption, the least you can do is opt for directed consumption. For instance, in the previous Sunday morning example, instead of opening any social media app and scrolling away, you can watch that video you saved a while back that you had planned to watch or search something about a topic that you wanted to learn more about, etc. It’s highly likely that your brain wouldn’t allow you to choose aggressive or distressing content now that you have a say in what you watch.

Yet more damning are the effects on younguns. It’s common knowledge that a young kid, during their developmental years, benefits immensely from exploring the real world, playing, getting feedback from the physical objects around her in order to grow healthy. Not always sitting indoors cooped up in front of a device for hours on end, unaware of what they are being fed(pun unintended). And even when indoors, there’s a case to be made against simply sitting down and passively watching something. When a child explores something on their own, for e.g. reading a novel or a comic, solving a puzzle, or playing with toys, it encourages critical thinking and allows them to learn important cognitive skills. Compare this to letting the algorithm on one of these apps serve you or your little ones curated videos that they watch and discard the very next second without any pause in between to think about what they just watched. Generally the content is so superficial, there’s hardly anything to think about and by the time the video approaches the end, they’re already invested in the next.

Finally, and this is a last-minute edit to the draft of this post, I’ve noticed friends and family members busy scrolling while they are sitting together in a group or are in the company of someone. It has become this tick that we simply can’t shake off. Imagine sitting across someone and they are reading tweets from random strangers on the internet in the hopes that one of these random bytes of information would come in handy…some day. Not only is this disprespectful, but I feel it makes it difficult for people to strike up a conversation. Purely happenstance, but I find it easier to start talking to strangers who are aged or not hooked onto their devices(you can tell) than with people who are busy with their devices, scrolling away.

Is there a way out? At the risk of sounding pessimistic, I’d say nothing’s going to change. The odds are all stacked against us with this one, to be honest. None of the companies behind these applications want you to spend any less time on your phones, hell, they want you to spend as much of your waking time as you can on them because that would mean more money for them. On the other hand, humans are primed by evolution to seek novelty and rewards. In prehistoric times, our ancestors had to be accutely aware of their surroundings in order to survive which made our brane attuned to releasing dopamine when something new and unexpected happened. Companies tap into this system by using mechanisms such as notifications and making it terribly easier to continue watching videos one after another simulating a slot machine. And so, we feel terribly anxious in a good way before scrolling between two bytes of information(video, image, etc.) in the hopes of hitting the jackpot, that one information that’s going to change everything, but it never happens, and that’s by design. But we don’t know it, and this is why, it’s extremely difficult for people to simply cold turkey quit using these applications or to self-regulate their usage. We’re just not built that way, it takes too much effort.

So bottomline, our time has been taken over, more often than not, we are no longer in control of our own state of mind, we’re losing out on crucial cognitive development benefits, and the very fabric of our social interaction is being changed ever so slightly. Situation is so dire, the kids are refusing to have food without their phones.

Stay tuned for a shortform version of this post.

:wq