TikTok rules the day, but longform media won’t go down easily.

Tidbit videos, called “reels,” no longer than fifteen seconds, keep us scrolling in a time-altering mind warp. The Substack writer Gurwinder discusses in his latest piece on why we waste so much time online; it’s designed that way. It is not an accident. We lose hours, days, weeks, years of our lives under social media’s alluring glow.

None of this is new information, and we can tell just by looking around that “shortform” content is certainly having a heyday. We don’t suffer from a lack of literature showing the deleterious side effects of social media apps like Instagram and TikTok. These apps are hives for mind-numbing video shorts. Kids especially suffer cognitive and social issues when parents stick that modern-day pacifier, the iPad, in front of their faces as young as two years old. All of this is well documented.

And yet, visit the world’s most popular podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, and you’ll find a trove of interviews running well past three hours in length. Plenty of other podcasts typically last over an hour or two. On Substack, there are many people advocating for a renaissance of novel reading, and some signs of light show that others are taking on the joyous challenge. Culture and music critic Ted Gioia writes,

Can longform really win in this environment? It won’t happen unless artists fight against the combined power of algorithms and financial incentives. But they’re starting to do just that.

Gioia’s article shows how there might be some fatigue with shortform content. We are, after all, often saturated with online short clips and reels every day, so maybe people are starting to re-cultivate an alternative appetite for longer, more substantial forms of media.

It looks like the shift is even happening in Hollywood. This is simply anecdotal, but over the last couple of years, I’ve seen a handful of films pushing three hours in length, including Oppenheimer, The Killers of the Flower Moon, and The Batman. Flipping through hundreds of short videos leaves the mind frazzled and disoriented. Watching a movie all the way through or sitting down to read a single linear narrative on paper may soon start looking much more appealing to a tech-tired generation.

The novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace picked up the internet’s pitfalls over twenty years ago, fearing how we as a culture were losing the ability to sit still and focus on important things.  

For Wallace, consumerism, always offering new products for people to buy on demand, is designed to cultivate discontent. Translate this principle for the digital age, and you have the modern dilemma of scrolling and swiping, never having enough, always needing one more reel to watch before going to sleep.

Fast Food vs. Thanksgiving Dinner

Maybe an apt metaphor is fast food versus a good, home-cooked meal. If one only eats McDonalds for ten years straight, he will probably be starving for a steaming Thanksgiving meal. Likewise, if we ingest a daily avalanche of shortform content, eventually we may feel starved for a good book, or a long, thematic movie that is actually about something. Maybe what we need is a good, long walk where we can think for a few minutes uninterrupted. Generation Z in particular, raised on the internet, might just be hungering to be a part of something that’s bigger than ourselves, and escape the fleeting dopamine hits from a screen.

Gioia wants artists everywhere to push back against the TikTok culture and commit to the long game: Creating deep, interesting, powerful works of art that take time to appreciate and absorb. Good art, as Christina Bieber Lake notes, doesn’t only please. It challenges, makes us pause, investigate our presuppositions, and look outward. That is what differentiates art from mere entertainment. In regard to reading fiction, she writes,

Yes, we read for entertainment and a dopamine hit. Yes, we read for escape. But for my part, those reading experiences are comfort food: we love them like we love the safety of home. When we venture out of our genre-fiction comfort zones to connect with different kinds of people, we find surprising new things.

If I want a novel, poem, film, painting, or piece of music to surprise me, I have to suspend all my distractions and choose to read, look, or listen. Perhaps it’s worth missing out on some funny fail videos go gain an altered insight or some newfound awareness. I’m not sure how much longer we can run on digital diets alone. Sooner or later, we need to eat real food.