It's not dopamine that makes short form content digital crack
Why did you click on that video? What about the title or thumbnail "spoke to you"?
Did it promise to contain a piece of knowledge you may one day find useful? Did it promise to make you feel some type of way if you watch it?
I've come to realize that most of my compulsive watching happens as a result of these two questions.
Information and emotion.
Of course our brain incentivizes consuming new informationâit's a survival mechanism. Up until probably some point in 2012, information was hard to come by. Now, information is abundant. If we're not cognizant of the mismatch between the reality of abundant information and our brain's default settings, it is all too easy to lose control of our attention. I covered this in my post 2012 (Rosy Retrospection).
Emotion is a different problem made difficult by the fact that we can't always explain our feelings. In this post, I want to dive into this part of the problem.
Clicking on a YouTube video, watching it for a few minutes, and then realizing it isn't what I wanted has become a common occurrence. I'm sure part of it has to do with a short attention span. But more significantly, I have begun realizing that (1) I love my life and don't wish to live the life portrayed by someone on YouTube (read more) and (2) the emotional reward for watching a YouTube video is shallow and temporary compared to emotions in the 'real world'.
So back to the topic at handâentertainment.
A fundamental idea here is that modern social media platforms lean much more towards entertainment than the social networks they once were. Herman and Jason cover this in this podcast episode. Furthermore, the entertainment offered on these platforms is akin to digital crack.
So how do you make digital crack?
- Pick an emotion to convey
- Convey the emotion in 60 seconds
- Post it on a platform that will automatically feed that emotion to someone exactly when they want to see it
Entertainment is entertaining because it conveys emotion.
Ironically, I credit this realization to a YouTube video which had an appetizing title like "You'll never watch short-form content again after watching this video".
The short nature of short-form content means that one ten minute session might make a consumer experience ten different emotions compared to a long-form session where a consumer may only experience a few emotions.
But why is this only a problem today?
Entertainment has existed as long as humans. It's how we pass culture down to our descendants, it's how we teach valuable lessons, and it guarantees we leave having felt emotionâlaughter, happiness, sadness, betrayal, lust, or anger.
And that is what makes short-form 'content' so addictiveâits ability to convey an emotional state in 60 seconds.
Why sit through a two hour play when you can have a serving of the same emotions within a few minutes from the comfort of your own home?
But the duration is only a part of it. The platforms that serve you these micro emotional states have a really good idea of what you want to feel in that moment.
This is so often why I click on the first or second video on my homepage. Because it seems to promise exactly what I want in that momentâand it's usually right!
What can be done about all of this?
But I was only successful after realizing that emotion is at the heart of addicting entertainment.
I invite you to think about how emotion plays into what you choose to consume online.
And remember, attention is the one thing you own that everyone else wants. I wrote more on the topic here.