July 22, 2022

Attention Span.

I know plenty of folk that enjoy the Tik-tok. It’s a great outlet for creative types and those that want snippets of entertainment. I get the appeal, but it’s not my thing. I’m very concerned about the security around the app and the company, and the quick hits tamper with the way my brain works. I just prefer longer videos. As much as I don’t trust Google, I pay for the ad free version of YouTube. I know paying for the service doesn’t exempt me from the privacy invasion but at least I don’t have to watch ads.

I’ve noticed many other social media services have been trying to do the Tik-tok thing; Instagram now favors short videos instead of photos in my stream. This agitates me to the point of avoiding Instagram for days at a time now. This week I noticed YouTube is now putting a decent helping of “YouTube Shorts” in my search results and suggested videos streams.

WHY?

With social media reducing communication down to 280 characters, I know society is losing it’s ability to read anything longer than a paragraph. But just as a paragraph can’t tell the whole story, I feel like a 30 second video can’t tell a whole story either.

Back in the early days of “The Web” I never imagined a world where things would become so erratic and mind boggling. And don’t even get me started on the deception and dishonesty with too many nuggets of information on the Internet.

I guess my vision of the future was short sighted.