> Social media has been around a lot longer than the last few years. Setting aside the (valid and important) point about the lockdowns, it also took time for s

> Social media has been around a lot longer than the last few years. Setting aside the (valid and important) point about the lockdowns, it also took time for social media to evolve into its current form. Snapchat and Vine came out in the early 10’s and TikTok in 2017. Twitter has never been especially widely used; it has outsized influence because corporate media types use it, but it’s not what the masses are scrolling. Social media might not be new, but the short-form video style of social media has taken off a ton in the past decade. At the risk of speculation, I’d also surmise that this is a major part of the problem. Humans have a primal desire to interact face to face. Full motion video of people talking to the camera is sort of a junk food version of human interaction. It’s the same reason watching people play video games on Twitch is more engaging when you can see their face in the corner of the screen, and why so many YouTube thumbnails include some recognizable face either looking into the camera or expressing an emotion. Photos and text don’t scratch the same itch, so they’re less addictive. (Some people can be addicted to text-based social media. I am one of these people. But we were the ones who got addicted to webforums and Usenet; probably not the typical user.)