In just the last 15 years, the internet has seen massive developments in the kind of online content users consume. Vine’s increase in popularity in 2013 was just the beginning of this shift from longer form media, including movies and television, to short–form content. This type of content is typically referred to as reels — quick clips that many people spend hours scrolling through on nearly every social media platform.
Before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, TikTok surged in popularity across the globe, and many other platforms began to follow suit in 2020 to effectively compete for user interaction. Instagram Reels, Snapchat Spotlight and YouTube Shorts were all introduced following TikTok’s initial success in the latter half of 2020, while Facebook added reels in September of 2021. Since then, endless scroll clips seem impossible to escape on nearly every social media platform — even Netflix, which has always been long-form content based, is now testing a vertical video feed which features clips from movies and shows on the platform.
Reels are specifically designed to keep users scrolling, maximizing their time spent on the app. They rely on the idea that users will continue to scroll in hopes of finding a more interesting video, betting that just a few swipes down is the gem they’ve been looking for — and this is what leads to addiction to social media and specifically the act of scrolling. The dopamine loop of scrolling keeps users coming back, therefore increasing the platform profit. However, this constant flow of content has been shown by numerous studies to have a lot of negative implications for both individuals and society as a whole.
A study published by Frontiers in Human Neuroscience in June 2024 demonstrated that increased time spent watching short-form content leads to a decreased attention span, explaining that “attention plays a pivotal role in cognitive processing with substantial implications for learning and adaptive behavior.” The increased consumption of 15 second clips directly correlates with a decrease in attention directed towards topics that require more time and attention. “The overall format [of endless scrolling] is extremely specifically engineered to capture and hold human attention,” says Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, a group leader on the topic of computational social science at the Dresden University of Technology.“It leads to overuse of such social media apps [rather than] deep deliberation with content.” This refers to the idea that having access to unlimited scrolling encourages users to disregard the true intention of the media they are consuming.
A larger societal shift can also be noted as a result of the prevalence of short-form content. “We can observe a trend towards more emotional, simplistic and us vs. them content, which may be associated with attracting attention more easily in [short-form] formats,” says Lorenz-Spreen. “We can also observe an acceleration of the news cycle, both in political but also pop-cultural domains.”
Since short content inherently requires the immediate capture of its audience’s attention in order to prevent them from scrolling to the next video, it’s not uncommon for them to be rooted in emotional or controversial topics. Compacting a greater issue into a quick 15-second clip oversimplifies the variables and complexities it contains, and influences further division of opinions amongst viewers.
It is also worth noting that reels are naturally more prone to spreading misinformation because they spread quickly and often lack credible sources.
Lastly, because of decreasing attention spans and the sheer amount of short-form content cycling through platforms, discussions surrounding global issues such as genocide and human rights are often not given the long-term attention they deserve but are rather treated as a “trend,” quickly dying when the next comes along.
However, just because short–form content is becoming an increasingly large part of society, that doesn’t mean it has to push out the longer forms or be the center of one’s online presence. “I think that film will always be an incredibly powerful form of art that can never truly be replaced,” says Sorel Ray, the operations manager and a film programmer at the Academy Theater. “I believe film is inherently political — as is all art in some form — and there is much to be gained and learned from it.”
Traditional long form content, such as movies, has been around for much longer and continues to captivate many people despite the surge of shorter content in the past decade. As for decentering short–form content from our lives, Ray believes that “The best thing people can do for themselves who feel like it’s taking over their lives is to try to just wean off of it slowly and replace that time with more meaningful things.”
The rising popularity of short-form content may seem inescapable, but it doesn’t have to be. Placing a larger emphasis on content that is more intentional and deliberate in its messaging can allow us as a society to slow down and not be caught in the fast-paced nature of short-form content. As Ray says, “A shared love of art can always hold us together in trying times.”
