Summary
The brain needs downtime to properly convert experiences to memory, and on social media, downtime is the last thing you'll find. More so than any other platform, TikTok provides users with a state of perpetual interference. Each new video disrupts the memory for the last.
The average TikTok user spends an astounding 90 minutes per day on the app. You can easily come away from an hour on TikTok having felt like 10 minutes, and with only a memory of the very last video you’ve seen.
While TikTok is the biggest culprit in this frenetic pace of content, it’s become a broader feature of our media consumption. It even seeps into the dense, long-form storytelling we try to savor.
As TikTok continues to eat into the attention spans of younger consumers, will there continue to be a demand for this kind of dense, patient, storytelling?
