When I read that a new scientific study had shown impacts on the brains of those watching short form videos I was delighted. As someone who doesn’t have a television, doesn’t let my daughter use any screens and refuses to watch videos – I always ask friends, ‘is there a transcript you can send me?’ – I felt vindicated. Perhaps now I could crow I told you so, videos are bad to everyone I know.
Participants were shown short videos they liked they ‘exhibited significant deactivation’ in parts of their brains responsible for ‘cognitive control’ – demonstrating a mechanism which might mean that short-video consumption makes people prefer instant gratification and lowers their self-control.
Is this backed up by other studies? Almost all of the research on short videos and ‘short video addiction’ (SVA) has been published since 2020. This, of course, is because short form video is a very new thing. The modern TikTok app has only existed since 2018, with Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts arriving a couple of years later. It also means that a substantial portion of the research into the emotional and mental impacts of short-video usage took place during the pandemic, a time which I’m sure we all agree was abnormal. Another limitation of the research is that the majority of it seems to have been conducted with Chinese university students.
But that being said, strong findings do show up again and again. Short-form video, with its rapid switching weakens powers of recall, although interestingly while researchers found that interruptions from ‘TikTok significantly degraded the users’ performance’, the same was not true of long-form YouTube videos, or Twitter (wonderful news for me as I can now hold this research up in defence of the many hours I spend on that site). There is also brain scan evidence that heavy users of short videos are relaxed about potential losses and make decisions on more limited evidence.
The negative effects on mental health also seem strong – a meta-analysis found that what they call ‘problematic’ use of short-form videos had a strong correlation with depression, anxiety, stress, loneliness and boredom, although non-problematic use seemed to actually reduce anxiety.
The weirdest thing, though, was the modern ‘dancing plague’. Between 2019 and 2022, doctors across the world reported a rapid rise in adolescents – mostly girls – presenting with Tourettes-like symptoms. Multiple researchers noted these and some linked them to TikTok videos categorised as #tourettes. It seems that this might be a case of a social contagion disease spread by short videos. All of this did overlap with the Covid lockdown though, which may well have been a factor.
On the face of it, these findings are very bleak and suggest that short videos are horribly bad for us all. But there are some reasons to be cautious. For starters, there’s no broadly-agreed definition of either ‘problematic’ usage, or even what ‘short video addiction’ actually is. There is also no real evidence that limited use of short videos is harmful, and that those harmful effects, including addiction, which exist are particularly concentrated amongst people who experienced emotional abuse and physical neglect as children. There is also evidence that short videos actually increase grey matter in some parts of the brain.
Even more significant is the research which suggests that even when short-video consumption does harm, the effects disappear once people stop watching them, and that they make little difference to ‘sustained attention’ tests.
What to make of all of this? I’d love to say that all video, all screentime is bad and we should bury ourselves in reading, but the evidence doesn’t really seem to support that. Staring at short videos probably does make us more forgetful, worse at judging risk and concentrating, and less happy. It also poses risk of social contagion, particularly for vulnerable adolescents.
But in the end it seems that that their harms are most notable in young people who have been abused in different ways as children. And if we put the short videos down, we’ll quickly be back to normal. So much as I’d like to argue for a ban on all short video apps, actually what I have to do is suggest that we don’t stare at them for hours on end.
And we can all put the phone down from time-to-time, right?
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