As time passes and new generations are introduced a greater and greater number of young children begin to indulge in these short-form videos for entertainment. This is mainly caused by busy parents needing their child to be entertained so they can do daily tasks without being interrupted. The question to answer is how can these videos affect new and developing generations? 

Short-form videos have become incredibly popular and are now the most consumed media on earth.

It is mostly consumed by the younger generations like Gen Z, Gen Alpha, and more. Short-form videos take form on several different platforms but the most popular one for exclusively watching short-form videos is Tik-Tok.

Most users watch about 55-95 videos a day this means around an hour a day for the majority of Tik-Tok users. In many cases younger children spend even more time watching these short-form videos since they tend to have more free time.

For many children their parents simply give them a phone, tablet, or iPad to distract them. While parents are working or driving the distraction of screens creates a form of addiction that tends to set in for young children. It creates a routine to distract the child, but a coping mechanism for the viewer. 

The reason why young children and even adults can be addicted to watching these videos is due to an idea known as a dopamine loop. A dopamine loop gives a feeling of entertainment or gratification by simply scrolling to a new video. This gets worse the more someone watches these short-form videos, as almost all of the video platforms use an algorithm to figure out what one likes to watch. The effects related to this lead to an increase the amount of dopamine one can get for each video they watch. 

An algorithm and dopamine loop can be detrimental to all ages but especially to young children as it can affect their development. A constant loop of dopamine can affect a young child when the it ends, generally when they stop watching short-form videos. They can get frustrated by the fact that they have to reengage with the real world. This can cause them to become frustrated or aggressive causing an immediate reaction of these kids to scream and cry upon them having their device taken away or shut off.

The same dopamine loop can also cause younger children to have much shorter attention spans and as mentioned earlier. Shorter tempers also cause a teacher to have some form of stimuli so websites like Kahoot or Blooket to keep children’s attention.  These sites have gotten significantly more popular as ways of teaching kids subjects while also having it be an interactive game. While these games are effective at having kids review they aren’t made to teach new subjects, teaching these new subjects can still be fairly difficult for teachers.

Around 92% of all of Gen-Z watch short-form videos and 62% of that percentage uses the most well known short-form video platform: Tik-Tok. Not only do viewers use it for entertainment but to even get their news. For Gen-Alpha about 70% of them watching short-form videos and this is a significant difference between Gen-Alpha and Gen-Z and the reasoning for why the gap is large is likely related to the Covid-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, Gen-Z had likely been much more heavily exposed to short-form videos due to lock down restrictions. 

Another cause for generations like Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha’s obsession over watching short-form videos is because of the large variety. People make these types of videos because they can be much easier to create compared to a normal video. These mass produced videos are usually fed directly into a person’s feed over time and this is where building of the algorithm starts to feed one’s watch preferences and introducing them to similar channels that they may frequently watch.

Short-form videos are not a new phenomenon, they used to be mainstream and featured on websites like X, Facebook, and Instagram which have been doing this for years. They are rarely familiar to the youth because of there intended older audiences.

Now, apps like YouTube and Tik-Tok which run similar to these apps, and owned by similar companies, have become more friendly to their youth audiences. Through the use of swiping up to get to new content. These algorithms are activity causing dopamine loops which leave genuine issues like shortened attention spans and aggravation. This issue and many others relate to how much the youth is learning is rooted in an increase of the consumption of these short-form videos.