Remember the last time you were on Instagram watching reels? And you were happily involved in it because Instagram has shown all of them according to your preferences?
How active you were? Or was it just a continuous activity of scrolling that you were doing subconsciously while talking to your dad or eating your breakfast?
The old times were so beautiful. People would take a week to read a book. All of that time there was a continuous thought process in their mind about the story they were reading. They learned from each chapter.
Each page made their day amazing. But with time we came so far from those good habits that we don’t remember when we read the last book in our life or on a further level – what was the title of it.
Has this made any impact on our life? Yes. We are humans and we like to have some spare time in which we take a gap from whatever work we’re doing and that time we now use with our cell phones. If we’ve spent this time reading a book we would’ve finished it in a week by just reading a few pages daily. But as we choose to spend it on social media let’s see what has changed.
Remember the last time your friend shared an 8 minutes IGTV video and you stopped watching it after the first two minutes? Remember the last time you were listening to something informative and you weren’t getting any interest in it?
This need for urgency and impatience is increasing among all of us today. We want everything to be fast. No one watches a video having a length of 1 hour except it’s an entertainment show.
Why? Remember the ads we skip on YouTube? Our fingers reach the skip ad icon before it even appears. Yes, it’s a time-saving activity. But didn’t you feel the same need for that icon for skip ads while watching a cricket match on Hotstar on your TV set?
It takes very little effort to scroll on the platforms like TikTok and reels where the maximum length you watch is one minute and a minimum of 15 seconds. And when you do watch 100 videos of 15 seconds in a day you get habitual with it and you start avoiding long length good informative content.
So be aware of these facts and don’t let social media reduce your attention span. You can practice activities like reading daily, watching long-length lectures on YouTube to have a balance in your life. Moreover, yoga and meditation can reduce mental relief.