2-51: The Half-Life of Content

Short-Form In, Nothing Out

It was a normal day after getting home from work. I’m sitting at the counter finishing my dinner when I reach for my phone. I pick it up only to forget why I picked it up in the first place. While my phone is in my hand, I instinctively pop open Insta, because why not?

Modern day social media has starved us of substance and coaxed us into becoming reliant on finely tuned dopamine cycles of ultra-short content. I am pretty sure the endless scroll started with Facebook, but before we knew it, Instagram arrived. Now, it’s almost impossible to find a content or social app that does not utilize the endless scroll. This endless scroll, when combined with algorithms, can be wildly addictive, and it is not natural because it does not have a set end-point. The “book” of social media is never finished.

If you’re curious, like I was, the average length of a scroll in Ancient Rome was around 11 or 12 feet. Let’s convert this to an Instagram equivalent and call it 3–4 per foot, so roughly 50 total. This would take the average Instagram user around five minutes to consume (10 posts at about 6 seconds per post). The math is hardly necessary to see my point. While I won’t go as far as to say that physical page-turning is the only suitable option, I am saying that endless scrolling is working against us.

From those 50 posts, you’re almost certainly not going to be able to recall their content the next day, let alone five minutes later. I’m trying to recall what I saw earlier today, and nothing specific comes to mind, other than knowing that many of them were about cars. You might recall one or two that made you laugh or smile for a couple of seconds, before scrolling to the next post to see if you were again so lucky. Conversely, watch a five-minute talk or podcast on YouTube and you’re very likely going to remember it the next day. Read a book for 20 minutes and you will surely remember its content.

It is both the quantity of content and the rate of consumption that are the culprits in stealing our attention. Books, movies, and a lot of YouTube (but not all of YouTube) require an order-of-magnitude more focus than zooming through Instagram Reels or TikTok’s. This spending of attention ultimately leads to recall after processing.

If you cannot remember what you consumed five minutes ago, it might as well not have been consumed at all. The goal is to leave something behind in your mind, not just pass time.