Short-form video kills memory and imagination

But books require memory, pondering, and imagination.

Reels kill memory and imagination. Short-form video has no resistance, it has no pause when you turn the page, it has no sharp edges. The reel wants you there, and it is there to transform how you focus and concentrate.

This is unlike the book. The difference between the media of books and short-form videos is striking. Once you understand the difference, you will think entirely differently about these media.

The Book

A book requires sight, ponderous touch, memory, and imagination. Your eyes are engaged as you look at the page, your fingers scan up and down, sometimes tracking words, sometimes flipping backwards and forward upon a page, and your memory traces what has come behind and in your mind then anticipates what comes ahead.

It's also strange that its structure is one that creates friction—the page is rough, the shape of a book is there in a rectangle, its edges are sharp, and every time you turn the page, it asks you to slow down and take a mental breath. The book medium is slow, ponderous, sightful, tangible, and memory-laden.

You must remember what came before and predict by imagination what comes after. You cannot just start in the middle and be entertained. It takes mental effort to begin reading again.

Short-Form Videos

The reel or the TikTok (i.e., the short video format) differs markedly. It privileges sight, hearing, and touch only insofar as it has the least amount of friction possible. The swipe differs from the turning of the page because the page has friction—it slows you down when you turn the page. The edge of the book is sharp, but with the reel, you swipe a finger across a smooth, rounded-edged screen. No sharp edges are there. Your finger slides across, and there's no resistance.

There's no mental resistance either. That's the second kind of resistance that reels lack: you both have the tangible finger swipe that lacks resistance, and then you secondly have the lack of mental resistance. Memory then is unimportant to this medium; you don't remember the reel that just went past. You don't need to trace the argument or the story and predict what might happen in the pages to come, because the reel doesn't ask you to predict or to remember.

You don't imagine the future or the past. It wants you to have the most frictionless experience possible so that you can see fast, addicting information. It privileges not memory but endorphins.

Distinguishing Between Media Types

And so the two media need to be distinguished from one another. It is perhaps possible to have a longer reel of 90 seconds to 2 minutes that gives you a sort of piece of communication. Sometimes, book reviews can be 100 to 250 words; we call those communication. Sometimes, a short video simply has to say: this is the problem, here's the solution, and here's how to understand it. I think that is fine.

But within video media, it's likely the longer video—the 7 to 12 minute or even longer video—that requires you to listen and hear in a way that is quite a bit different than a reel. It's different still than the book media, and yet there's more resistance: the ability to stare for a long time in the same direction, to hear one word after the other, remember what has come before, expect what might come in the future. This differs remarkably from the reel.

How Reels Affect Our Cognition

The reel kills memory and imagination. It has no resistance, it has no pause when you turn the page, it has no sharp edges. The reel wants you there, and it is not there to destroy your ability to concentrate.

No, the reel wants you to concentrate on it. It changes what it means to focus. To focus on a reel is to focus on short pieces of visual media over and over and over that excite curiosity or interest and keep your eyes on the screen, trying to give you a dopamine kick. It wants you to feel good about what is happening, and any kind of pause that makes you reflect, any kind of pause in the swipe, any ad that pops up or anything that slows this down, or any notification that pops up, is friction that awakens you from your stupor. Reels don't want that. TikTok does not want that.

Short-form videos or reels:

• Lack friction

• Lack tangibility

• Don't rely upon memory

• Don't rely upon imagination

• Don't rely upon the mind

• Aim instead to excite the passions so that you might have an emotional kick

By contrast, the medium of book:

• Requires memory of what happened in the past

• Ignites the imagination of what happens in the future

• Use the ponderous part of you (mind)

• Leads to slowness caused by the turning of a page

• Creates resistance and friction

Conclusion

The media that we use shapes who we are. Does your memory matter? Does your imagination? What about your attention span? By distinguishing media, we can make better decisions about the kind of media we want to use. For me, I’d suggest that short-form video probably will not benefit us as humans in almost all cases.

Note: parts of this article rely on the work of Byung-Chul Han.