TikTok Is A Nice Place To Visit, But You Can’t Live There.

We may not yet have reached peak TikTok, though it doesn’t seem as far out of the question as it did a year ago (https://lnkd.in/dp-Hqwbb). But the possibility raises a more general question about the long-term attraction of increasingly personalized content feeds: Is there a point at which you might you lose interest in the output of an algorithm designed specifically to keep delivering things that will engage you? Is ‘going off your feed’ the natural and inevitable consequence of having too much of a supposedly good thing for too long?

My in-house longitudinal case study of TikTok consumption among early teens (It’s not bad parenting. Just solid research methodology.) indicates that there comes a point when the active expectation of interest devolves into a rote process of ‘checking,’ like a hunter who can’t help checking all her traps every morning even though she hasn’t seen a live animal for weeks. Eventually, the checking itself becomes the pastime, and while your hypothalamus feels like you’re still doing something that might pay off in protein/dopamine, your cortex and body posture say otherwise.

One way to explain this ‘frog in slowly boiling boredom’ phenomenon is to separate attention from interest. Attention simply moves the camera, sometimes so quickly that the motion blur itself feels momentarily exciting, even interesting. But interest requires “thinking about,” the exercise of attention that develops memories. In other words, “for an app that claims a lot of attention, it doesn’t demand much brainpower. That leaves TikTok vulnerable to the moments when viewers, to put it simply, snap out of it.” (https://lnkd.in/dzi37ae2)

Another possible explanation comes to us straight from The Twilight Zone, specifically, Season 1 Episode 28: ‘A Nice Place to Visit’ (https://lnkd.in/dxagbQ3h). Two-bit hood Rocky Valentine is shot dead and transported to a place where he always wins at everything. He tries to explain to his host (played by the redoubtable Sebastian Cabot) that winning doesn’t mean anything unless you lose sometimes and the feeling of being trapped in a heaven of constant winning is driving him crazy, so he’d rather be sent to “the other place.” Of course, his host laughs heartily while assuring him, “This IS the other place!”

To see something as interesting, you need a less interesting background to see it against. Its value stems from the fact that it could have been otherwise. A personalized stream of content pre-ordained to be interesting leads inevitably to the other place. TikTok is a nice place to visit, but you can’t live there. They Might Be Giants have a song about this episode called ‘Hell Hotel’ (https://lnkd.in/dCJr_aNJ) and if both Rod Serling and TMBG believe something, then so do I:

We're here to make you happy
That's all that we are programmed for
But you say this pleasure's a pain for you
Sebastian C. could tell you more
Well-well-well-welcome to Hell Hotel
Well-well-well-welcome to Hell Hotel