XIOMIDIA

When I was 10 years old, I got my first iPad and I have been glued to the Tube ever since. Every day I’d get home from school and jump straight to my bed to watch videos for hours at a time. As I got older, I started to watch my favorite YouTubers get married, divorced, start families, get cancelled, and reach incredible milestones. Eventually, I slowly stopped watching YouTube when I reached high school, and suddenly I was hooked onto the next best thing, TikTok.

Short form content has been warping our minds for years, and I can’t even imagine the amount of miles my thumbs have run swiping through this clock app. TikTok is easy to sit through, you tell yourself you’ll watch a few videos, and suddenly you’re down a rabbit hole of people eating Buldok noodle burritos.

My addiction to TikTok is one that I’m not afraid to admit, but this past year I found that my favorite short-form creators were making 20-minute vlogs of their days back on my old friend, YouTube. So, for the past 12 months, I reignited my relationship with the platform. As I started watching my favorite TikTokers there, I discovered new ones and reconnected with old YouTubers I hadn’t seen in a while.

This week, I decided to test my relationship with YouTube yet again. But this time, I willingly went on a detox. I stopped watching Slushy Noobz, Vanilla Mace, old Emma Chamberlain videos, Quenlin Blackwell, and so many other niche YouTubers I’ve grown attached to, almost like they’re a part of my every day circle.

Throughout the week I kept swiping through my phone looking for the app in its typical spot, but kept bumping into the reminder that I had deleted it. The change wasn’t dramatic, I just turned more to TikTok and typically scrolled for longer.

Still, I tried to redirect my habits. On Monday and Tuesday, I watched movies with my sister when I got home from work instead of watching YouTube while eating dinner or getting ready for bed. I picked ones I knew I could sit through, like Get Out (my all-time favorite) and Fun With Dick and Jane, an old classic that never fails to make us laugh. On Friday, I even started My Big Fat Greek Wedding, but the urge to watch one of my favorite creators’ newest releases fought me hard.

The most interesting day was Wednesday. Charlie Kirk had been killed, and I was intrigued. I wanted to watch the news on YouTube since that’s where I usually get my updates. TikTok, by comparison, felt less reliable since it can just be old clips or anyone speaking about anything. In Stolen Focus, Hari writes that colleagues at Google would ask themselves questions like “How can we make this more engaging?” Which to Hari really means, “more attention-sucking, more interrupting” (p. 113). While Hari is speaking about the standards at Google, this is exactly what it feels like TikTok is doing when I liked one video about the incident and the algorithm instantly kept feeding me more.

As the TIME article by Jamie Ducharme explains, “human brains want novelty, excitement, and social connection, and devices play into those desires.” Each swipe or notification gives a “small hit of dopamine, creating a sense of reward that keeps you coming back for more.” The problem is, as Gloria Mark’s research shows, “the more you engage in task switching, the more your brain wants to wander and look for that new thing.” In the early 2000s, people shifted focus every 2.5 minutes on devices but today, it’s down to just 47 seconds.

That statistic felt real this week. My attention was constantly running from one app to another, one video to the next. But the small moments I had like calling friends, sitting through a movie, resisting the urge to re-download YouTube, all proved that while my attention span may be fragile, it isn’t lost completely.