25 EPIC TIKTOK FROG MEMES (I CRIED???) (EMOTIONAL) (NOT CLICKBAIT) (18+)
Let's talk about how our attention spans are being chopped up with a butcher's knife.
I think it's been pretty easy to notice the "tiktok-i-fication" of social media apps in the past few years. The term is admittedly a bit of a misnomer since really it was Snapchat that started this trend, but as you might have noticed as of late, every big app's trying to shoehorn a video format in one way or another: Youtube's Shorts, Instagram's focus on promoting Reels, Reddit PAN, Tumblr Live... The videos tend to be under 30 seconds long, quickly spoken, vertically filmed, and filled with so many cuts it actually gives me headaches sometimes. To be clear, I have nothing against fast-paced videos - I'm a big fan of them whenever I'm tired and just want to consume something that'll inject me with 20ccs of liquid adrenaline - but their inescapability is what's bothering me.
If this video format was limited to those sections of the sites, it'd be one thing, but this editing style has been seeping into the standard formats too. For example, I was watching a video with a friend a few days ago, which I assumed would be a calm, lightly edited commentary video - a tierlist ranking of tumblr fads. Yeah, not exactly high-class art, but still. The video opens, and instantly I am kicked in the face with a jumpcut on every sentence and meme soundbites on every other sentence. It wasn't even cutting for the sake of comedy, it was just... a zoom-in in the middle of a sentence for no other reason than just having something happen visually (which seems really, really common in these videos). People have been complaining about loudness and clickbait on youtube for ages now, but I feel like the the newer trends are worse in terms of attention span violations.
I think it's also important to state that, in comparison to the average age of people who still use blog sites, I am still fairly young; I've only used a VCR like once in my life to watch The Prince of Egypt, I'm only now starting to break into the big scary world of "not living with your dad," and I can't remember what I was doing on 9/11 on account of having been a fetus at the time. A lot of the talk I hear about the "pre-internet era" or the societal change that smartphones brought is something I can only really speculate on from second-hand accounts, so take the content of this post with a grain of salt, but rewatching and replaying stuff from the 80s and 90s really highlights this change. Movies like Ghostbusters and The Thing are excellent, but they're noticeably slower paced than anything that came out in the past 10 years.
Everything has to be flashy, exciting, and now, and we end up getting worse experiences for it. By not letting us have a moment of peace and quiet in our media or our lives (I'm looking directly at you, smartphones), we end up missing out on a lot of rich experiences we could have if we just stopped to smell the flowers. Most of my friends can barely hold their attention long enough to finish books anymore despite really enjoying them previously.
I don't really have something to wrap this post up with, frankly I think I forgot what my point was about halfway into this rant, I'm just generally sad at how things are shaping up.