The University of Maine states that the average time a person spends on their phone watching social media today is 2 hours and 21 minutes. Technology has been improving every year, with new updates for people to be more invested in it. Social media has also been a part of this. Social media has short-form videos that range from 10-60 seconds, and this is the new form of entertainment for people all over the world now.
Adults, teens, and children worldwide have been affected by this constant loop of watching and scrolling onto the next video in social media. There are various topics that people of many interests can choose from to watch on social media letting all people of many different interests to go and watch different things.
According to the National Library of Medicine, short form videos can be extremely addicting, as they release rapid bursts of dopamine. You never know what the next video can be, so people have the feeling of anticipation to continue scrolling, and without realizing it, 30 minutes have passed by.
These short videos affect people’s attention span in the negative direction. By being used to getting all the information they have in short, 30 second videos, they will lose interest quicker when they are learning at a slower pace.
The phone ban that Hackley is enforcing is helping with improving people’s time spans as it reduces the amount of time students spend on their phones, meaning that they don’t watch social media as often. This then helps them to get used to learning in a slow, more concise way, which then leads to an improvement on how they focus on the information given to them.
I believe that these short form videos impact students negatively. It doesn’t help with the fact that classes take a larger amount of concentration, and these short videos are degrading the attention span that students have. As technology improves over the span of years, there will be more opportunities for students to try out new devices, which I believe isn’t good as it will make it worse for students to focus in class, leading to poor test results.
