Am I the only person who feels pretty neutral about short-form videos? Vine was a thing and nobody was complaining about that. I used TikTok for a bit and it was ok for entertainment but I don’t feel like the short-form videos were particularly addictive. When I was a kid, ads on tv were our short-videos. Memes are pretty brain-rotty too if you think about it. I put them all in the same category - just silly entertainment to chuckle at during downtime. I quit TikTok after the ban drama etc. and I haven’t missed it. On the other hand people bitch about people making dance videos in public and sure that can be annoying but then: I think it’s cool that kids get some motivation to dance. Obviously any easily consumed thing is going to be a problem for some people but I still feel like the particular hate short-form vids get is more about old folks (I am old folks) by default hating everything kids do.
I think the focus on short-form video (or short-form content in general) misses the point. I don’t know that short-form media is inherently worse than long-form, but it does lend itself more readily to algorithmic manipulation. Essentially, the shorter the time between starting a piece of media and starting the next piece (and the more quickly users upvote / like / heart), the more finely-grained the data that gets fed into the preference engine. It’s simply more profitable to
makedistribute content that’s as simple and atomic as possible.I have experienced tiktok, Instagram and YouTube shorts after I got married. The content itself is what matters the most. The short quick video formait is probably a catalyzer or a helping agent. The amount of lies, fake science, propaganda, and most often horrible and dumb content is what causes the brain rot. As Dr. Ouajih puts it, with short form content you are exposed to thousands of subjects per day, an amount so high our brains cannot process it. If asked about what we just saw, we would certainly not rember. So now that we have trillions of subjects and a very short exposure to each one, it messes with the brain.
Add to that the algorithm that only cares about what gets you hooked and not what makes smart.
The observation I got on myself and people who got addicted is a severely shortened attention span. It got for me hard to watch a 20 min video.
If you did watch 100 shots about same subject, then probably not a big deal. But if you watched just 20 shorts about 20 different subjects then it affects your brain.
Thomas the Tank was awesome.
Another complaint pointed at the wrong concepts. Like saying drinking water is bad for everyone’s health because you’ve been drinking it from your broken toilet.
