The Tyranny of Short Form Social Media Content
Three Point Essay #29 | How unlimited quick & cheap dopamine assaults your mind
Here’s a three-pointer to open your mind.
Carl Sagan was an astrophysicist, astronomer, and writer. He assembled the pioneer plaque and the voyager golden record, the first physical messages sent into space.
He was successful by all measures, and a bright Scientific mind. He was also a prophet of sorts. In his 1996 book wrote:
I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time…the dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less)…
In 1996 he predicted that dumbed down, short form content would become big.
Look at the world in 2022, where Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and Tik Toks reign supreme. It came true.
It makes sense. At any moment, you’re just a couple taps away from a genius algorithm endlessly feeding you content you enjoy.
But if these are the main sources of your information consumption, that’s a big problem.
Assaults On Your Critical Thinking
We tend to think that more information = good. The more content we absorb online, the more rational we will be, right?
No.
The world is more complex than you realize. You can't comprehend everything that's going on.
But the excess of information you consume can give you the dangerous illusion of all dangerous illusions—that you understand the world perfectly. That you can link every effect straight to its cause and vice versa. That you can explain everything going on in politics, culture, and the economy.
Obviously, you can’t. But technology today allows people to convince themselves that they can. You’ve watched a bunch of Tik Toks about it, so you’re an expert!
You can negate this by realizing that the most intelligent thing you can do is know your knowledge has limits. Everyone wants to sound smart and have an opinion on everything. But often, the smartest thing you can say is “I’m not sure.”
Assaults On Your Attention Span
Cal Newport is a computer scientist, professor at Georgetown, and bestselling author of 7 books. He created the famous deep work hypothesis:
The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.
The reason deep work is becoming more and more valuable is because less and less people have the ability to do it. An entire generation of attention spans is being destroyed by non-stop short video stimulation.
Newport has been a vocal critic of social media over the years. Because he knows it is the enemy of deep work.
If you condition your mind to only absorb and focus on bits of information that last~30 seconds, you’ll never be able to enter into a deep state of work. On anything. It doesn’t matter what you do.
Awareness of this is important if you want to be productive. I wouldn’t be able to write these articles if I didn’t take active steps to be less compulsive about going on social media.
Assaults On Your Mood
Try out this simple experiment:
Spend 20 minutes staring at Instagram
Then, spend 20 minutes outside staring at a tree
See which one puts you in a better mood.
:)
Who you follow on social media is a more important decision than you think. You want to expose yourself to people you want to be like and learn from. You want to program your brain in a good way.
But even too much scrolling seeing people you admire can produce negative effects. You know, that emotion one no one ever admits to feeling—envy.
But if you spend less time compulsively scrolling, you’ll stop making unreasonable comparisons between yourself and other people. Foolish comparisons that make you feel bad.
Go stare at a tree instead.
And 1 — Creating Versus Consuming
Social media is an incredible tool. You can connect with people you couldn’t otherwise, express yourself, and build online businesses.
But these are only possible if you create content. If you’re strictly a consumer, you’re part of the 99% (the customers) instead of the 1% who profit by creating and sell things online.
So if you don’t want to be a creator, it’s a good idea to spend more attention on books and podcasts than social media.
Consuming information in the long form requires concentration. Therefore, it’s likely to actually help your critical thinking, attention span, and mood.
Very true.
Very true.