One time I watched a YouTube video about the possible end of the influencer economy. She talks about how influencers are contributing to the shrinking attention span and rise of financial illiteracy with people. While I agree that influencers aren’t blameless, I think the root cause of all these problems is that folks are realizing that they have no self control. I’ve had a smart phone since I was 10, and I never developed a social media addiction. Why? Well, for one, my mom raised me to practice self control. For two, I’m one of the few people who actually gets bored of short form content. I like long videos because they give me more to think and talk about and provide more passive entertainment for longer. Short videos should never be anyone’s main form of entertainment. Short videos are like candy. Candy is great, but eating it every day for every meal will have negative effects on your health. It’s also important to note that not all short videos are the same. There’s a big difference between binging educational videos from animal sanctuary channels, and binging videos from a millionaire make up influencer. One has actual substance and can help you learn something new and start a conversation, and the other is consumerist slop that no one outside of the internet would care about.
Folks whose main source of entertainment is TikTok are extra annoying when they go to YouTube. I always roll my eyes whenever I see folks complain about a video being too long in the comments section. It’s even more telling when they say that about 30 minute videos. If your attention span is so broken that a 30 minute video is too long for you, then that’s a sign to get off the internet and reset your brain. Go spend a few screen free days engaging in something long, boring, or tedious to train your brain to deal with boredom. Read a 500+ page book in one sitting, sew or crochet something, do yard work, organize and clean one of the rooms in your home, go for a mile long walk, etc. Even spending all day watching 2+ hour movies without checking your phone is better for your brain and attention span than scrolling on TikTok all day. Those types of comments are even more hilarious because it’s as if folks forgot that the pause button exists. YouTubers don’t expect people to watch an hour + long video in one sitting. You’re allowed to pause the video and come back to it when you have more time. You know, like TV. Did those people forget what tv was like? Kids I understand, but there are 30+ year old adults who can’t sit through a 30 minute video. The shortest tv shows were at least 15 minutes including commercials. If you weren’t able to finish an episode or movie, and owned a DVR, then you paused it and came back to it later. It’s not rocket science. If TikTok is ruining your attention span that much, then that’s an even bigger reason to log off and reset your brain.
Speaking of using your brain, folks really need to just pay more attention to what they’re watching. You’re not supposed to just mindlessly scroll and watch every video that appears in your feed. Even if it’s short, that’s still time being spent on stuff you probably don’t even like. All this consumerism slop wouldn’t exist if folks took the initiative and started actively cleaning out their feed of all the content they don’t like. The block, mute, not interested, and don’t recommend buttons exist for a reason. Even if they’re not as effective as they should be, it’s still better than just mindlessly consuming product placements and A.I. slop and doing nothing to stop engaging with it. What I do to proactively curate my feed is every time I see a YouTube video recommended to me that I think I’d like, I always go to the YouTuber’s home page and scroll through their upload list for a bit and read the titles and check the thumbnails to see if the kinds of videos they make are about topics that I’d like. If I notice that the videos they make aren’t topics I like, then I go back to the recommended page and click “Don’t Recommend Channel” on the recommended video. That way, my feed doesn’t get cluttered with videos I don’t like or get recommended by people with questionable tastes and beliefs. An example is one time, I got recommended a video that was an analysis about an anime I liked. When I checked out the YouTuber’s page, I saw they recently made a video where they had one of those anti feminist soyjack memes in the thumbnails and the title used the r-slur. I immediately clicked “Don’t Recommend Channel” on that video. Another example is when an art piece popped up on my Twitter feed that I liked. When I went to the artist’s page to check out their other art and possibly follow them, I saw that their most recent art was sexual art of little girls in bikinis. I immediately blocked that artist.
I think the best way to fix social media is for everyone to start doing that for all of the types of content that they consume. Pay attention to who you’re watching and look at their upload history before you engage with them so you don’t end up accidentally supporting a morally reprehensible person, a shameless product promoter, or A.I. slop. Stop being passive and stop expecting everything to be automatically curated for you. Use the tools that’ve been right in front of you the entire time.
