You open TikTok for five minutes and suddenly two hours have vanished. Since the appearance of the social media app “TikTok” in 2018, many people have been led to believe that it is shortening their attention spans. What is TikTok? TikTok is an app for posting short videos. It all started back in 2013 with the app Vine, where they posted six-second comedy videos. Then, in 2015, there was the platform called Musically, which was a lip-syncing app. In 2018, Musical.ly became TikTok. Then, Instagram developed Reels, while YouTube launched a similar feature, known as “YouTube Shorts”. Then, Snapchat joined in with its own feature called “Spotlight.” All of these forms of media share one common feature: how short they are.
TikTok has had a huge influence on the lives of many teenagers and young adults over the past few years. A lot of them have practically grown up with it. It is so easy to open the app and scroll through videos for hours at a time. This can be a huge distraction for many of the app’s users, and many people say it causes laziness and pulls them away from their priorities, and I myself can confirm this.
Almost everyone gets that urge to stop whatever they are working on and check Instagram or TikTok for a second, and then they get consumed and end up scrolling for hours. People, mostly teens with still-developing brains, end up getting used to short videos and different content. This can ruin your attention span and make it easy to be distracted from important things in life. It is a major contributing factor to modern procrastination. Its short-term video design provides instant gratification and dopamine, which ultimately encourages addictive, endless scrolling. Studies have shown that this can cause users to avoid tasks that require focus, which could lead to academic stress and burnout.
There was a case study in fall 2024 done by the Community Research Institute (CRI) on how the overuse of short-form video platforms, such as TikTok, can shorten the attention spans of young adults. Their goal was to ask questions about how respondents used the platform TikTok, and whether their use, or overuse, of the platform has an impact on their ability to focus on tasks for a long period of time. They collected 207 survey responses, and 91% of respondents were 18 to 22 years old. 64% of the respondents were female, and 52% had an undergraduate degree in education. The survey results showed that most respondents spend significant time on their phones and admit to being distracted by the media quite often. The study states that 88% of Gen Z spend a significant amount of time on their phones, and 80% are often distracted by social media. It also states that 80% of TikTok users are between 18 and 34 years old, and that the average attention span of Gen Z is only 8 seconds. 48% of participants agreed that TikTok affects their ability to focus for extended periods, and 55% of students agreed that TikTok prevents them from going to sleep at a reasonable hour.
So yes, TikTok is a major factor in why teens and young adults have worse attention spans and other sleep or procrastination issues. Hopefully, one day we, as a society, will find a solution to this problem.
