QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:
● Shot: Is short-form video rotting our brains?
When I read that a new scientific study had shown impacts on the brains of those watching short form videos I was delighted. As someone who doesn’t have a television, doesn’t let my daughter use any screens and refuses to watch videos – I always ask friends, “is there a transcript you can send me?” – I felt vindicated. Perhaps now I could gloat I told you so, videos are bad to everyone I know.
Participants were shown short videos they liked they “exhibited significant deactivation” in parts of their brains responsible for “cognitive control” – demonstrating a mechanism which might mean that short-video consumption makes people prefer instant gratification and lowers their self-control.
Is this backed up by other studies? Almost all of the research on short videos and “short video addiction” (SVA) has been published since 2020. This, of course, is because short form video is a very new thing. The modern TikTok app has only existed since 2018, with Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts arriving a couple of years later. It also means that a substantial portion of the research into the emotional and mental impacts of short-video usage took place during the pandemic, a time which I’m sure we all agree was abnormal. Another limitation of the research is that the majority of it seems to have been conducted with Chinese university students.
—David Shipley, The Spectator, yesterday.
● Chaser: The Moms of TikTok Have Gone Insane.
Struggling, sleep-deprived moms are propping up their phones in their bathroom, hitting the record button and throwing ice at it while screaming for a whole minute. “Instead of having a screaming match with my toddler,” one mom wrote in a social media post, “I throw ice into my tub. It allows me to feel angry without being destructive.” Moms are also setting up ring lights to film themselves hysterically sobbing in front of their small children. Others are filming their crying babies with the caption “Me too, Lindsay,” in solidarity with Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mom who killed her three children—ages 5, 3, and 8 months—and is currently on trial for murder.
This brain rot has spread like wildfire, as the algorithms made sure it would, and in the momosphere—the network of TikTok moms and mommy influencers and mom bloggers—it has been almost universally embraced as a healthy, liberating way for mothers to exhibit their rage. Part of this comes from how Clancy’s case has been understood: Her defense argues that she was in the grips of postpartum psychosis at the time of the killings, and has pointed to the many medications prescribed by different doctors to treat her depression symptoms in the months leading up to the killings. To the moms of TikTok, an overwhelmed and overmedicated mom practically begging for help is something, maybe an extreme version, of what they see in the mirror. Which is why Clancy has been claimed as a martyr, rather than a monster who acts as a cautionary tale.
—Kara Kennedy, The Free Press, Sunday.
● Hangover: TikTok May Be A Chinese Superweapon.
As troublesome as TikTok’s trends are, the app’s greatest danger lies not in any specific content but in its general addictive nature. Studies on long term TikTok addiction don’t yet exist for obvious reasons, but, based on what we know of internet addiction generally, we can extrapolate its eventual effects on habitual TikTokers.
Research shows an association between smartphone addiction, abnormalities in brain gray matter, and “digital dementia,” an umbrella term for the onset of anxiety and depression and the deterioration of memory, attention span, self-esteem, and impulse-control (the last of which increases the addiction).
These are problems associated with internet addiction generally. But there’s something about TikTok that makes it uniquely dangerous.
In order to develop and maintain mental faculties like memory and attention span, one needs to practice using them. TikTok, more than any other app, is designed to give you what you want while requiring you to do as little as possible. It cares little who you follow or what buttons you click; its main consideration is how long you spend watching. Its reliance on machine learning rather than user input, combined with the fact that TikTok clips are so short they require minimal memory and attention span, makes browsing TikTok the most passive experience of all major platforms.
If it’s the noninteractivity of online content consumption that causes atrophy of mental faculties, then TikTok, as the most noninteractive social media platform, will naturally cause the most atrophy. Indeed many habitual TikTokers can already be found complaining on websites like Reddit about their loss of mental ability, a phenomenon that’s come to be known as “TikTok brain.” If the signs are becoming apparent already, imagine what TikTok addiction will have done to young developing brains a decade from now.
TikTok’s potential to stupefy people, both acutely by encouraging idiotic behavior, and chronically by atrophying the brain, should prompt consideration of its possible use as a new kind of weapon, one that seeks to neutralize enemies not by inflicting pain but pleasure.
—The Prism, January 21st, 2023.
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