Why the heck short videos everywhere?

In this blog, lets see how short videos make our life worse

I take the metro every day to college, It's circa 1-hour journey. Sitting there by my book what I notice is no one else is having one. weird.. because when I was a kid I see many of them have some sort of book with them or else they be listening to some music or taking a quick nap but what now only I see are people swiping their fingers up. looking at their screen forgetting what's going on around them and have wanted to consume every micro sec of these short videos. Short videos huh? They may be short but the effect they have on us is not so.

Nowadays I can't think of any social media or entertainment app that does not have some kind of short video feature

Instagram has REELS

Facebook has CLIPS

Netflix has QUICK LAUGH

YouTube has SHORTS...

Are short videos so great that they need to have them? What's the problem with long videos, blogs, group chat portals, etc.? The problem is not complex actually short videos are doing nothing but giving us what we want "Entertainment Without Interruption " or what I like to call "Entertainment Stimulation".

What these videos do is not far different from drugs keep us distracted from the world and let us live our own fantasy world in our 15x15x8 cm box. consume them and you want to consume more of them and even more till you lose all your energy doing so. Short Videos keep us entertained by showing different content with each swipe so our brains do not hang up on one topic like with long videos or this blogs that keep up on the same topic for long. The problem with this SHORT TIME is that it reduces our "passive time", Even if there is a boring seen in a movie to see in the movie we try to make up for that time by looking at these videos. 

Short videos are also making us less productive as after a long time of these videos flashing in front of time, the mind needs some time to adjust to things that require more focus like reading. Activities like reading require long focus as someone has to pay attention to individual words and mostly has to understand each line to make correct sense of what's told.

Now I can also do is tell you some of the benefits of Short videos but sometimes it is necessary to pay more attention to what is wrong to understand the benefits of it later. 

My suggestion would be to get into the habit to question "What's not right?" to deeply understand and reap the best out of anything.

Ayush Gupta