In late 2018, many teens and young adults alike would start flocking to a new app called TikTok. This caused its popularity to surge and soon allowed for short form content and doomscrolling to see a rise in popularity and normalcy.
After TikTok’s success, many other social media apps, like Instagram and YouTube, followed in its footsteps and added short videos to their platforms. Today, about 75% of teenagers say they watch some form of short form content online every day. With this large amount of teenagers consuming short content, the question of how short form content is affecting teens and our current society arises today.
Many studies have proven that excess doomscrolling can negatively affect one’s attention span. Because many people’s attention spans keep getting shorter, longer media is no longer being watched to its fullness or isn’t being watched at all.
For influencers, this has caused them to completely pivot to adapt to this modern form of entertainment. For example, Law By Mike, a popular influencer, focused on long form content at the start of his career. However, in more recent years, he started creating shorter videos, which allowed him to gain millions of followers.
Short form videos don’t just affect the influencers making them, but also the big studios that are making the newest movies and TV series. These studios want to assure that their movies are hits and that people are tuning in to watch their productions. To make sure this happens, recent movies that have come out involve non-stop action or rapid fire comedy to ensure that the audience does not lose focus.
Matt Damon, a popular American actor and producer who has worked for many streaming services, has come out and said that many movies and series that Netflix makes should restate the plot three or four times in the dialogue because executives expect viewers to be on their phone while watching the movies or series. These are some ways that the entertainment industry has tried to keep up with the changes that short form content has made.
Although these changes have been difficult on a number of different people, there seems to be another side to this argument. Even though many influencers had to start specializing in shorts just to keep up with public demand, this widespread call for short form content has allowed for many new people to go on the internet and become popular due to the amount of people seeing their videos.
Many on the internet also tend to post clips of different movies and TV shows online, which often gets users hooked on the plot. This causes people to then go out and find the movie or show and watch it, allowing for a bunch of free, successful promotion for movie companies.
When it comes down to the Loyola community, the opinion on this matter seems to be pretty split. Francisco Tesen ‘26 believes that short form content is the death of our attention spans and will also be the death of true, heartfelt cinema.
Francisco stated, “Most people our age have to sit with their phone scrolling, or playing Subway Surfers while watching The Godfather. And that I believe is a sin.”
On the other side of the argument, Jacob Diaz ‘28 believes that short form content is not only entertaining but can bring people together. He says that he has been able to find so many interesting TV shows and movies while online, and not only that, but communities where people are able to bond over one common thing they love.
Whether or not short form content has affected the world today positively or negatively is irrelevant. The only thing known for certain is that it has and will continue to change both the internet and the entertainment industry.
