It’s never pleasant to confront something unflattering about yourself, particularly when you catch yourself in the act. Recently I was mid-conversation with a stranger at a party, when I suddenly became conscious of my internal monologue: yes, hurry up, get to the point, you’re going to say this, then that, and what is the takeaway here?
This wasn’t the first time I had noticed a shift in my real-life interactions. Over the preceding months, I had felt tired, even irritated, when loved ones so much as veered close to an anecdote or detail about their lives that I thought I had already heard. During interviews I conducted as a journalist, it sometimes took a heroic effort to concentrate on conversations once they failed to be truly stimulating. Ordinarily I am endlessly curious about people, but I couldn’t ignore a creeping feeling that my attention was waning.
The source of the problem was clear to me. At the beginning of the year, I became freelance and started working from home full-time, and I found myself constantly scrolling social media. I hadn’t noticed before how much Instagram aggressively forces short-form video into our feeds in the form of “reels”, but now they were the majority of what I was seeing. Hours of my “working day” were spent watching them. It seemed obvious that this content, algorithmically fed to cater to my interests and concerns, had started competing with real-life interactions. Subconsciously, I had begun to expect conversations to provide speed, relevance and the ability for me to skip through at will.
It would be highly unusual if this was only happening to me. TikTok and Instagram have boomed in popularity since the pandemic. My very offline boyfriend, who doesn’t use social media, thought what I was saying was horrific – as disgusting as me watching videos on 2x speed, as I am wont to do.
It has long been argued that “digital dualism” is a false construct – there is no real separation between offline and online spheres. So of course an increase in digesting short-form content could affect how we relate to people in real life. It was a relief when a friend told me she got addicted to reels and now can’t bear irrelevant information in conversation. And it was even better when another said it would be nice to be able to skip through and speed up interactions in the way you do reel to reel.
Short-form video weakens our ability to hold an intention after an interruption, according to one 2023 study, which is troubling when you consider that to have a conversation you must remember information and hold your intentions to reply. One of its authors, user experience researcher Francesco Chiossi, said that my experience is a perfect example of the impatience that watching too much short-form content engenders. “The deeper we try to go, the more information we have to retain and the more impatient we become,” he says. To compensate, he adds, we switch topics, interrupt, drift off or pick up the pace because we (perhaps falsely) believe we’ve already processed what is being said.
With the threat of losing my real-life friends in mind, I emailed Marissa Fond, sociolinguistics professor at Georgetown University, for advice on what someone should do if they find their attention waning during everyday conversations. “They could take a deep breath, notice that they’re participating in a practice they don’t like, slow down and try to engage their curiosity about the content or person involved,” she replied. In other words, retrain yourself for the friction and pace of life, dummy.
I’ve tried mentally berating myself when I clock I’m getting irritated or distracted. I remind myself that this is exactly (probably) why some tech overlords don’t let their own kids have social media. My next step will be deleting the apps on days off. After all, it’s true that the best conversations are nothing like content. They aren’t all sparky like electricity but take on the form of water. They allow me and another person to meander, to seep into places we have no business being, to become emotional. We push and pull and create a unique tide between us. There is no “hook”. No frenetic pace. Any clear takeaway is often submerged by more questions. Sometimes it’s boring but often it can be quite beautiful – if you have the patience for it.
Hannah Ewens is a freelance editor and writer, and the author of Fangirls: Scenes From Modern Music Culture
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