Breaking free of TikTok’s hypnotic grasp
More people are recognizing the self-harm involved and are putting away their phones
A major change is underway in how consumers use the internet. For the first time since 2014, the combined ad spending of Facebook’s parent company Meta and Alphabet Inc.’s Google dropped below 50 per cent. In this same year TikTok doubled its advertising market share.
On TikTok, the user is primarily passive, no longer charting a course by typing inquiries or searching for friends, but merely repeating two gestures: swiping their finger downwards, and tapping a “like” button. The algorithm takes care of the rest, continuously giving the user what they desire.
TikTok is the most engaging social media platform, with its active user base of 1.3 billion spending an average of 25.7 hours on the app per week. A recent study published in Addictive Behaviors found that 8.7 per cent of their sample of college students exhibited Problematic TikTok Use (PTTU).
For these users, TikTok’s hypnotic interface replicates the effect of a windowless, clockless casino; what Natasha Dow Schull in her 2012 book “Addiction By Design” refers to as the “otherworldly zone” where “embodied existence in this material world is exchanged for a timeless flow of repeating moments.”
In this vein, I consider myself a recovering YouTube addict. In 2015 I began watching the video content on Buzzfeed’s website, which served as a gateway to YouTube and then, via sidebar recommendations, vlogs. In lifestyle vlogs, the viewer is addressed as a friend, often opening the video with the characteristic phrase “Hey guys.” While I was at first jarred by the hyper-mundane content of these videos and obvious trickery of the camera’s view being mistaken for my own, I came to enjoy the illusion.
Platforms like YouTube and TikTok feed viewers false closeness and our collective appetite is growing. Social media apps account for nearly a third of the Canadian average of daily leisure time spent on the internet, some 6.45 hours. My “parasocial” dependency on influencers increased during the pandemic. Alone in my apartment, I boxed myself into my 4.7-inch phone screen and gazed pseudo-voyeuristically into the curated lives of “real people” I will never meet.
But how much of any of this is new? David Foster Wallace in his 1993 essay “E Unibus Pluram” diagnosed the then-average American television watch time of six hours a night as a comparably addictive cycle: “the more time watching TV … the harder it becomes not to feel alienated, solipsistic, lonely.”
In an attempt to address my own technology-induced unease, this summer I went offline. I replaced my iPhone with a flip phone and locked up my personal laptop. Johann Hari’s “Stolen Focus,” which begins with an account of the author’s digital detox, is Amazon’s best selling non-fiction book of 2022. Hari and others have found a wide, popular audience for their descriptions of life without social media or smartphones.
Is opting out the only way to regain control? Do the risks of social media addiction extend further than mere self harm? Perhaps it is best to pose the question Langdon Winner asks in “The Whale and the Reactor,” his 1986 classic on the philosophy of technology: “as we ‘make things work,’ what kind of world are we making?”