The subject is a fair one to investigate. The video itself comes off like one big ad. Vague and noncommittal enough in its investigations to avoid being accused of giving wrong information, while also specific enough to steer the viewer toward the sponsorship. (I’d be more interested in a study on the impact of sponsorships shoved into every faux social connection between viewer and performer.)

I’m also just suspicious of the focus on TikTok. They did use the term short form video some of the time, but in general TikTok has been vilified in association with Cold War style hatred of China, so any time people start separating out TikTok from other social media like it’s distinct gives me pause. It’s like when people say China is going to steal their data, but they leave out the fact that western design has already done so.

That said, I’m sure that the things we do regularly have an impact on us. Question is what is that impact and what is the worldview behind how people feel about the impact. Why is the focus on studying short form video, but not on studying what causes poverty? Might sound unrelated, but one of those has a more obviously damaging impact and we don’t need fuzzy studies to understand that poverty sucks. I think we here know the answer as to why it’s the one and not the other. TikTok has been one way people have gotten info beyond the controls of legacy media and helped them formulate views that make the imperialists sweat. Associating such platforms with harm can potentially scare people away from using them and put them back in the hands of legacy media. It’s one of those things where bias is so important to understand. A study can produce factually accurate information by some metric while being biased on what is being studied. The western media sphere is rife with this kind of faux neutrality. Meanwhile, if we properly study a thing like poverty, it leads us to anti-capitalism.

My suspicion on this subject in general (which needs concrete investigation, but there is some reasoning to it) is that a lot of what this is sort of orbiting around is energy levels and rested vs. not, and the reason the information on it is so vague is because the prevailing status quo has a motive against promoting the value of rest. Even the way things like meditation get framed in the self help, self improvement sphere, is as another tool for optimizing the human experience, human capability, etc. There is something that I recall from before and I don’t know how well studied it is, but it’s called “decision fatigue” and the general idea is that making decisions takes energy, so if you have to do a lot of it, the later decisions in the day will probably become less thoughtful, more “just get this done with.” Swiping is a decision and if you’re doing that a lot, that’s a lot of decisions. So I can see how that could wear a person out as decision-making is concerned and then if they are faced with a question that requires taking a step back and doing deeper analysis, they may feel more wearied about it and appear more impulsive and make more mistakes as a result.

So in the context of short form video, my hypothesis would be that the most distinct to its form kind of factor is quantity of decision-making and the more general factor is one that applies to all of the content-bloated internet, which is that novel input takes energy to process and being able to shove it into your brain constantly could wear you out (but this could also apply to flipping through TV channels too and that’s been around a ways before high speed internet).

To be honest, sometimes I feel that the capitalist backlash against inattentiveness is basically promoting drudgery (overwork without rest), shame, and basically attacks people for “quiet-quitting.”

Is there a socialist backlash to this?

I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:

• yewtu.be
• inv.nadeko.net
• yt.artemislena.eu
• piped.video