Tik Tok-xic: Is time running out on our attention spans? 

By Enya McIntyre

The COVID-19 Pandemic has brought about many things- sickness, loneliness, isolation but also; TikTok. In the wake of boredom induced by the new “stay at home” regime, millions of people across the world began turning to the internet for entertainment. TikTok being the star of the show. 

However, according to Senior Business Information Systems Lecturer, Dr Eoin Whelan, these 15-second content hits may be giving us more than we bargained for as neuroscientific evidence exists suggesting heavy technology use may be restructuring our brains.

A good way to think about it is, technology is a lot like food. You have to consider how much you are consuming. If you consume too much food, you get obese and lots of other health problems. If you consume too much social media, you have other problems. You get overloaded and can’t think straight and are just overwhelmed”, says Dr Whelan.

The Chinese app which allows you to record videos of 15-60 seconds is popular for its dance routines, cooking tips, funny videos and more. The video-sharing app has hit record-breaking download figures as over 250 million downloads were recorded for the app in the first quarter of 2020 alone.

The short length and reel-like effect, where one video flows directly into the next, makes it easy to spend hours on the app without notice. 

Final year Nutrition and Health Sciences student, Michaela Murphy deleted the application after realising the toll it was taking on her concentration.

I deleted it last semester when things started getting really busy with college because I noticed I kept clicking into it thinking I’ll just look at this for a quick second and would end up spending over half an hour on it. It’s just a wormhole that you get sucked into”.

The University College of Cork student reveals that after deleting Tik Tok, she observed a noticeable difference in her time management. 

I feel like it’s definitely made a difference, I’m not on my phone as much and I’m making better use of my day. I’m actually going for walks throughout the day and reading and stuff which I hadn’t done before. And I don’t know if that’s directly related to Tik Tok but I definitely think it’s making a difference”, says Murphy.

As for parents, Tik Tok has given the phrase “extra limb” a whole new meaning in terms of their children’s activity on their phones. 

Mother of three, Carol O’Hanlon Diviney says, “Being on your phone pretty much 24/7 cannot be good for you. I’d be concerned with what could be coming off your phone and the long term effects that could have on your health. I believe it could be quite serious”. 

There is much debate over the impact of technology and apps such as Tik Tok on the human attention span but as stated by Dr Eoin Whelan, there is currently no conclusive evidence to support the theory that technology is deteriorating our attention spans. 

However, it is certain technology provides us with more distractions.

“We have all of this technology that we can switch from email back to Powerpoint back to WhatsApp”, says the NUIG Senior Lecturer.

We rapidly switch from one task to another and when we do that, it taxes our brain. There’s an energy cost to it so you might be focusing on one task 100% but if you split that between 2 tasks, it’s not that you can split your attention 50/50 it’s more like 40/40 because you’re losing 20% of your energy, your mental capacity just by the process of rapidly switching between things”.

Thankfully, as Dr Whelan points out, it’s not all doom and gloom. We have power over our own attention spans.

The good thing is people can learn and develop self-control. Research has shown self-control is like a muscle- you go to the gym, you lift weights and get stronger. If you go 20 minutes without looking at your phone one day, then increase to 30 then 40 - your self-control actually gets better”, says Dr Eoin Whelan.

So, we all have decent attention spans; it's just whether we have the self-control to use it or not”.