I find it weird that this focuses specifically upon "short form video" as though that's the dangerous or addictive element.
It's like saying drinking consistently throughout the day is dangerous without specifying whether we're talking about bourbon or water.
That key variable seems to matter more than the format.
For example: how do you think a person would feel if they watched 30 minutes straight of "short form video" of kittens playing with each other as opposed to a person who watches 30 minutes of people telling them their political opponents want them to die.
Somehow I think these two scenarios would have very different "mental health" impacts. As with anything, it comes down to what people choose to consume, not how they consume it.
The nature of the content is an important variable to control for in future work, but the primary negative impact appears to be via the devastating effect on human attention.
From the paper: "repeated exposure to highly stimulating, fast-paced content may contribute to habituation, in which users become desensitized to slower, more effortful cognitive tasks such as reading, problem solving, or deep learning. This process may gradually reduce cognitive endurance and weaken the brain’s ability to sustain attention on a single task... potentially reinforcing impulsive engagement patterns and encouraging habitual seeking of instant gratification".
Is all short form video "highly stimulating" and/or "fast-paced" though? I can see the argument for the format being inherently stimulating/fast-paced, but I think that it still comes down more to the content than the format.
The pace is the format. Even if you're just watching turtles for 30 seconds, the loop and the switch to next video are fast-paced context switching, which is stimulating. I suspect it has similar mental effects to constant interruptions, like a bad day at work where slack and email prevent you from getting into flow state/real work.
The format also encourages maximum aggressive video editing where the short video is further chopped up with cuts and zooms etc, techniques designed to tickle your brain and keep you engaged, more stimulation.
Look at what twitter et al. did to long form reading. Short video is the same.
> The pace is the format. Even if you're just watching turtles for 30 seconds, the loop and the switch to next video are fast-paced context switching, which is stimulating.
I've been over-indulging in context switching long before short-form videos ever showed up. The internet itself is all about context switching. But the UX around short-form videos definitely encourages doomscrolling, similar to how microtransaction games encourage neverending grinds.
We definitely need better habits as a collective, but I think a list of "do's" is just as important as a whack-a-mole list of "don'ts".
Yep, the internet as a whole and is the real culprit. We love instant gratification and short feedback loops and the internet provides.
I feel like things will likely get worse before it gets better, but I have long-term hopes that eventually we'll see some cultural change that promotes doing vs consuming.
> Even if you're just watching turtles for 30 seconds, the loop and the switch to next video are fast-paced context switching, which is stimulating.
I'll agree that it's stimulating... I guess the question is then: how stimulating it is, vs how stimulating the content itself is? As the initial comment said, we need more data on the specific types of content.
It's an interesting question. Personally, I feel like it's a combination of factors.
On the content side, I think the content editing can have more of an impact than the subject itself. For example, I can watch something like a fast-paced action movie with a reasonable amount of camera tricks for a couple hours without any noticeable strain, but 30 mins of a modern cooking show can be exhausting just because the average time between camera cuts and zooms is only a few seconds. The latter jams so much stimulation into a small window that baking a cake is on par with a car chase.
On the format side, regardless of content, the loop and video switch gives me similar vibes to the editing tricks, but ofc the short video probably also contains similar editing, so it's a double whammy, and likely spread across different subjects as you scroll every minute or so. Bonus points if the content itself is stimulating.
If the modern cooking show I described is cocaine, doom scrolling shorts is crack cocaine. Harder, faster, more addictive.
Aye, the fast-paced editing is extremely jarring. Another variable that makes these discussions so difficult to reach a conclusion! :( We need to consider stuff like this - content and subject matter, not just format - when it comes to figuring out what is harmful about this stuff, not just say "short form videos are bad!"
Very similar to social media. What is it about social media that's harmful? Is it the connecting with other humans - which seems to me to define social media? Or is it the algorithms? The infinite scrolling? Something else?
(I'm not denying we're facing very serious issues that are certainly being exacerbated if not entirely caused by popular uses of online platforms; I want to solve those issues. I just want to solve them in a productive and non-reductive manner. Taking correlations and running with them is not that, and will not only not solve the problems, but will lead to massive privacy and security issues (see: ID verification))
It may be that some media or some alcohol is more toxic than others, but it's still fair to test whether the mode of administration has an independent or enhancing effect.
E.g., crack cocaine is more addictive than nasal, and extended release Adderall is less addictive the immediate-release. So there's good reason to hypothesize that SFV has similar addiction-enhancing effects over long-form, and the article meta-analysis says problems in inhibition and cognition are among the strongest.
wrt choice, the thing about addiction is that while becoming addicted results from a series of choices, being addicted impairs your choice-making executive functions. Addicts use even when they don't like it, and to the exclusion of other things they prefer, and often switch from expensive drugs to cheap ones just to maximize use.
So in the same way that society would prefer to prevent rather than treat legions of fentanyl addicts infecting cities or meth addicts roaming the countryside, society would like to avoid the cognitive decline and productivity loss of a generation lost to scrolling.
Not for me. It's also about the kind of thinking this behavior engages. If you only think superficially about kittens for 30 minutes ... personally I would find that similarly awful. Whether the videos are rage inducing or not, it's only passive consumption. And I would rather spend that time using my brain.
The danger of short form videos is because the form enables the algorithm designer to artificially maximize the reward with minimum effort by the viewer. It doesn't matter whether you watch kitten ones initially. After watching it for a month casually, chances are you would end up watching some addictive videos for hours with little effort. It could be some endless stream of Buddhist monks talking about suffering, if someone likes that kind of thing. It's just designed to be addictive with crazy high reward/effort ratio.
It's like saying drinking consistently throughout the day is dangerous without specifying whether we're talking about bourbon or water.
That key variable seems to matter more than the format.
For example: how do you think a person would feel if they watched 30 minutes straight of "short form video" of kittens playing with each other as opposed to a person who watches 30 minutes of people telling them their political opponents want them to die.
Somehow I think these two scenarios would have very different "mental health" impacts. As with anything, it comes down to what people choose to consume, not how they consume it.