Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think we can safely say that TikTok has spread like wildfire across the globe in the recent years. The Western version became an overnight sensation, merging with Musical.ly (nostalgic yet?) in 2018 and blowing up during the multiple lockdowns that followed to the point of surpassing Instagram in the number of downloads for two consecutive years. However, is the app simply harmless video-based social media, or is it an attention-seeking machine, designed to control the culture and trends of the younger generations?
Let’s first examine the interface and structure of the app. Although they say not to judge a book by its cover, the “For You Page” (FYP) reveals a lot about the reason behind TikTok’s success. As soon as you enter the app, it lands you on your FYP, as opposed to your followed accounts, like Instagram or Twitter. This means that you don’t even need to have a following in the first place to begin seeing personalised content, which becomes increasingly more accurate and predictive. TikTok’s AI is one of the most advanced attention-grabbing algorithms and is backed by a very questionable privacy policy at that, allowing it to collect not only your IP address and precise location, but also your age, messages, likes and comments, viewership, search history in and out of the app, and much more. This combination creates an incredibly efficient personalised feed that somehow seems to know you better than you know yourself.
TikTok is designed to entertain quickly, with rapid dopamine rushes from the fifteen to sixty second videos. Considering it’s used primarily on mobile devices, the interface is an important part of the user experience – too much on the small screen, and the user is overwhelmed, too little and the interaction potential isn’t reached. That’s why the like, comment and share buttons are stacked on the right of the screen, adapted not only for the majority right-handed users’ ease, but also to conserve the milliseconds of time that the user may have needed to spend, should the buttons have been placed around the page.
However, the reason behind its addictive nature lies in what’s termed as the “intermittent reinforcement” (often used to train animals). It has been shown that constantly rewarding positive behaviour doesn’t work long-term – what does, is random and occasional encouragement. This is why the seemingly endless vertical scroll of TikTok, and the short length of the content allows for a large number of videos to be watched in a short amount of time – and not all of them will be interesting to you. That isn’t the algorithm messing up, that’s the algorithm sporadically rewarding you with entertainment to keep you hooked on the dopamine release.
Now, the format of TikTok has clearly emerged victorious over the rest of the social media apps, prompting them to do the old “sharing is caring” and adopting a similar format in some way or another, to up the engagement on their platforms. On Instagram we now have Reels, on YouTube we have Shorts. Both are the same style of short video snippets designed to catch your attention within the first two seconds before your finger swipes away. There will always be more content to see, therefore the users will not waste time on anything that doesn’t provide the aforementioned reward.
The increasing universality of this attention-grabbing mechanism is rewiring the way we consume content online. Other, unrelated services must adapt to have even a sliver of a chance of getting some of our time dedicated to them – news, films, books. Any form of entertainment oriented at the current teenagers is being forced to adapt to hook us. Headlines are becoming snappier and more dramatic, TV plots are required to interest us in the first ten minutes, YouTube videos are more and more condensed, decreasing revenue for the creators, all because our attention spans are shrinking, catalysed by the TikTok algorithm.
It is a dangerous game, and the sheer reach that TikTok has, along with its loyal following that continues to thrive off the virality that promises to propel them to fame is something to be weary of. Shortened attention spans are already affecting working patterns and memory, and, at the current rate, it could get much worse.
At least, if you’ve read this far, I’ve managed to keep you interested for approximately four minutes.
