How Doom scrolling Affects Human Creativity: The Role of Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok
How Doom scrolling Affects Human Creativity: The Role of Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok
- Overloading the mind with the whale of information
Doom scrolling reflects the weighty and floodless waters of brain. With all these Reels, YouTube Shorts, and especially-the famous TikTok, a mind grows resistant when it comes to developing meaningful ideas and gives wings to its creativity.
- Diminished Attention Spans
Faster-bite sized formats train a user to prefer fast gratification as opposed to tasks requiring extensive thinking and prolonged concentration, very important for a user to develop creativity.
- More Passive Consumption than Creation Activity
This primarily tends to lead a person into just passive consumption through watching short videos. He has little motivation left to create or produce anything himself and this limits creative processes.
- Inhibition of Original Thinking
When TikTok, Reels, and Shorts are overwatch trends with viral formats, the original thoughts are greatly blocked. And most of the viewers unconsciously copy those things instead of creating new ones; thus their creative thinking ability goes downhill.
- Increased Anxiety and Stress
Doom scrolling typically includes viewing the content that creates some negativity or induces anxiety in people. Stress, as we have seen, restricts the healthy creative flow of thinking since it drains energy into counteracting those negative emotional responses, rendering sparse ideas from the brain.
- Drain time while being active in productive activities
Endless scrolling consumes most of the time that you could use for your hobbies, brainstorming, and talent development, all of which are important in feeding creativity and personal growth.
- Dependency on External Validation
Likes, views, and shares appear to be existent-only markers of performance in these platforms. This thereby establishes a craving for outside validation as the internal inspiration for making something genuinely personal diminishes.
Thank you for sharing this thoughtful and insightful post!
It truly resonates with me. I’ve often felt that the endless scrolling through TikToks, Reels, and Shorts does more harm than good to our creativity and focus. Your points about diminished attention spans, dependency on external validation, and passive consumption are spot on. It’s a reminder for me to be more mindful of how I spend my time and to prioritize activities that nurture my creativity and personal growth. I really appreciate you putting these thoughts into words—it’s a perspective we all need to reflect on more often!
//Inhibition of Original Thinking //
Absolutely! Vinushan,
Viral trends often lead to imitation rather than innovation. Do you think platforms should encourage originality more? If yes, how could they do it?