Photo credit: Gilles Lambert, unsplash
The act of ‘double-screening’ has recently taken the world of media by storm. Any and all long forms of content, such as movies and shows, seem to be catered and marketed towards audiences who won’t give it their full attention.
Have you been to the cinema lately, and felt a bright light or two in your peripheral vision?
Going to the cinema has become a nightmare. Theatre etiquette is completely thrown out of the window as people of all ages are downright rejecting the works in front of them for their much smaller, and less demanding of attentions, screens. Stories delivered on threads, or even again, short-form videos, follow similar recollections, growing more and more in multitude daily, of phones being on and scrolled through mindlessly while movies play.
Whether it’s a scroll through a text thread, reviews of the movie they’re watching or something as random as the weather app or their own gallery, people are crazed for their devices. The feel of the cold, cracked plastic running against the speed of their fingertips is an indescribable drug.
With a constant need for short form videos, there is a process of shortening the attention span that takes place, and instead of being fulfilled by longer forms of content like they used to be, people now only seek a short lived stimulant.
All these fast-paced and rich in so many effects videos force a brain into a sort of hamster wheel of satisfaction, providing a stimulant for people of any age and restrict it to only that, not allowing for longer forms to ‘stick.’
Photo credit: Robert Worrall, unsplash
EEG Studies from the National Institute of Health conducted a study that indicated science behind ‘brain-rot’ actually being damaging to our brains. As a result of the study by Tingting Yan, Conghui Su, Weichen Xue, Yuzheng Hu & Hui Zhou, of participants aged 18-65 years of age, it was found that short form content and mindless scrolling give the brain short and quick bursts of dopamine, making it a constant stimulant.
This, in turn, showed a negative correlation with diminished self-control and phone addiction. The short-form videos provide a quick burst of dopamine, satisfactory enough for our brains to not ask for more, or even if they do, another scroll is only seconds away.
This also takes another turn when applied to the short form videos consumed. With the constant wanting and request of more and more shorter and more deserving of attention videos, society fuels a machine of micro-trends and influencers who get overworked and burned out because, despite the fact that a video may be 15 seconds long, it may have taken days to create. It also creates a competitive field for everything, and since videos and content creation is a creative one, this makes it an extremely negative career.
These influencers never know when they could get dropped or ‘cancelled’ because the trends change everyday, multiple times, without warning.
Which brings in the influence and such growing consumption of AI-generated content. Clearly very damaging in creative spaces, AI takes on the role of a shredder to originality and individuality necessary for creative spaces that cannot be earned back as easily as it is destroyed.
With this, a circle back to cinema now shows a much more dire product. These constant small portions and never consuming a long piece of creative work, is, firstly, damaging to cinema as a whole because it will kill out the product. Secondly, because the need may remain but the want will dissolve and succumb to the short form content only. If it hasn’t already that is.
In recent years, movies seem to be trying to work with this algorithm, rather than against it, and as a film student, I can confirm this fear. Movies and shows no longer leave room for ‘show, don’t tell’, a story told visually and through reading the ‘mise-en scene’. It is now all about characters saying everything they’re doing, fulfilling predictable moulds of storylines because the timeframes in which people want award worthy projects just isn’t humanly possible.
All these factors of short form video consumption heavily influence our media today. From movies, as described, they are somehow longer but with no filler moments of character or world development.
Similarly, shows used to have filler episodes, a chance to get to know a character and be able to predict their next move because they were so well written, not because they tell the audience their every move. Books, and written form content too, even the article you are reading right now is a form of media that has been influenced. From short snappy one liners that will grab a reader’s attention in articles, to quick paced and fast acting characters in books, humans as an audience for all this content and creativity are eliminating it without realising.
In all these products, there is not one moment to just be. And this restriction to only moving and fast paced videos in palatable, snack sized portions is becoming a poison to creativity and imagination.
In this search for constant stimulation of the worst kind, brains will stop reaching for the longer forms entirely, this makes the situation dangerous and potentially irreversible.
Photo credit: Marija Zaric, unsplash
Emma Gagula is a second-year Film and Digital Media student in University of Galway. She enjoys writing creatively and engaging in current issues and opinion pieces. Outside of school she enjoys reading, preforming and writing.