Journalist Hannah Ewens has noticed that her addiction to Instagram Reels has made real-life conversations feel like a drag. She says she has begun to expect conversations to provide speed, relevance and the ability to skip through at will.
How the addiction started
At the beginning of the year, Ewens became freelance and started working from home full-time, which led to constant scrolling on social media. She says Instagram aggressively forces short-form video into feeds in the form of “reels”, and they soon became the majority of what she was seeing. Hours of her “working day” were spent watching them.
She noticed the shift during a conversation with a stranger at a party, when she became conscious of her internal monologue: “yes, hurry up, get to the point, you’re going to say this, then that, and what is the takeaway here?” She also felt tired and irritated when loved ones veered close to an anecdote or detail she thought she had already heard.
What the research says
A 2023 study found that short-form video weakens our ability to hold an intention after an interruption. One of its authors, user experience researcher Francesco Chiossi, said Ewens’s experience is a perfect example of the impatience that watching too much short-form content engenders. “The deeper we try to go, the more information we have to retain and the more impatient we become,” he said.
To compensate, he added, we switch topics, interrupt, drift off or pick up the pace because we believe we’ve already processed what is being said.
Advice from a sociolinguist
Marissa Fond, sociolinguistics professor at Georgetown University, advised that someone who finds their attention waning should “take a deep breath, notice that they’re participating in a practice they don’t like, slow down and try to engage their curiosity about the content or person involved”.
Ewens says she has tried mentally berating herself when she gets irritated or distracted, and her next step will be deleting the apps on days off. She reflects that the best conversations are nothing like content: they allow people to meander, to seep into places they have no business being, and to become emotional. “Sometimes it’s boring but often it can be quite beautiful – if you have the patience for it.”
