The world is very different now. There are TikTok trends and scrolling, and that is changing us all. We’re losing attention span, but are also more aware of it than we were a few years ago. The very core of our lives has changed, and I believe for many of us it’ll stay that way. Even if we manage to go offline by an immense power of will, we’ll always know that there’s a magical cyberspace that most of our friends and family live in. If the people around us change, so do we.
But I’m not so gloomy about it. I think, in fact, that it should be interesting to see how we as humans will react to this scrolling phenomenon. Scrolling through social media, like anything else, will eventually be saturated in our lives, and like anything else, we’ll get sick of it (if we haven’t already). That’ll lead us to react (as many of us already have), and we’ll fall back closer to where we used to be before social media, except, we’ll have some pretty neat Instagram videos to show for it (and some quite morally questionable ones as well).
Many TikTok content creators are already striving to move away from simple, naive jokes and trends, and create more depth in their content. Some use it to showcase the artworks they’ve spent tens of hours on, and some simply apply great cinematography and writing that makes their videos as worthy to watch as a section of a great movie.
Consumers are also trying to limit their social media usage, and being picky about what they would like to see. They follow and unfollow, cancel and uncancel, and some simply leave this space and learn to be at peace with the fact that it exists, and that they’re not in it. There’s a dynamicity in all of it.
This should, in the near future, bring a better equilibrium to our online lives. As we react, we grow and learn to use the tools we have better. But like the growth of capitalism, many evils will remain. Will the world be better or worse? Who the fuck knows? But we’ll find a way to keep our humanity nonetheless. We’ll react by going offline or learning to make fire without equipment, and the combination of our earthly humanness and the digital space will be, at the very least, interesting to see. So let’s have some fucking hope.