This is part 2 in a multi-part series on social media, memory and the psychology of time. You can begin with part 1, here

As we’ve seen, media is in the novelty business. As Tom Womsgans distilled for us, “the news is all the things which are “new”. But what’s considered old, and what’s considered new isn’t etched in stone. The media’s job, in large part, is to decide what should be considered new. Media - writ large, is in the business of inventing novelty. 

This has deep implications for the psychology of time perception, since novelty is the yardstick through which are brain measures how fast or slow time is moving. In a very real sense, the media we consume determines how fast we feel time is moving. This begs an important question: when media shifts to social media, what does this do to our perception of time? And what does it do to the psychology of memory?

Let’s dive in. 

The Media’s Shift from Television to TikTok

As media technology has evolved over the years, the world as seen through the screen has only gotten more frenetic. On TV, an hour could be filled with maybe 20 news stories. On Twitter, it’s over 200. The smallest of micro-events, which would never dream of making the “TV” news, now became the content that filled newsfeeds. A journalist's off-colored remark on air. A professor caught on camera ranting at a student. A famous author taking a controversial political stand.

Twitter, however, moves at a snail’s pace compared to TikTok. Its powerful algorithm, unbridled by existing social ties, quickly zeroes in on a sequence of videos that is hyper-personalized to each user. Grabbing and maintaining attention for sustained amounts of time means keeping the user engrossed with highly personalized, and highly novel content. Audiences get bored seeing the same kinds of things over and over.

A system that’s constantly vying for your moment-to-moment attention will do so by appealing to the most salient content and extreme emotions. As Paul Bloom writes in The New Yorker, “Being in the moment is said to be a perk of sadomasochism; as a devotee of B.D.S.M. once explained, “A whip is a great way to get someone to be here now. They can’t look away from it, and they can’t think about anything else!” 

It’s an apt description of just how much social media, and especially TikTok, keeps its users to “in the moment”.

The Impact of Social Media Use on Time Perception

Given the effect of novelty on time perception, we would expect the time spent on social media to be slower. If novelty slows things down, the time spent on TikTok should feel like molasses. However, as any heavy user will tell you, the very opposite is true. That hour spent watching 45-second TikToks breezes by in what feels like a matter of minutes.

A 2017 paper by Lazaros Gonidis and Dinkar Sharma, researchers from the University of Kent's School of Psychology, confirms this. Their research found that time spent on social media does, in fact, speed up time - users severely underestimate the amount of time they spend. What they feel like 10 minutes can easily be 30 or 40. As the researchers told Business Insider, "We flick through the videos one after the other one after the other..And then, without realizing it, we have spent an hour or two, instead of spending 10 minutes."

So what’s going on? The “news” on TV slows down time, but the “news” - turned up to light speed, on social media feels like light speed. The answer may lie not in the social media experience itself, but in how social media disrupts our memory.

The Psychology of Memory for Time

A clearer picture begins to emerge when we consider how time perception plays out in memory. While we’re having an experience, we have an intuitive sense of how fast or how slowly time moving. This sense, as we’ve seen, is heavily influenced by how much novelty we’re experiencing during that period.

We can also view time retrospectively; we also have a sense of how long a period was. This is the distinction that Behavioral Economist and Nobel Prize Winner Daniel Kahnemann calls the two selves: The experiencing self, and the remembering self. By extension, this means that there are two types of time psychology: 

• Experienced Time: The pace of time at the moment (e.g. how fast time feels right now)

• Memory for Time: The pace of time within a memory (e.g. how fast an experience was)

These two aren’t always in line: What feels fast in the moment, can feel slow in memory and vice versa. 

Like experienced time, memory for time is also influenced by novelty. Things that are packed with new, unexpected things are deemed to have lasted much longer. When you are on vacation and your days are filled with unexpected, serendipitous adventures, it will not only feel as though time is slowing down at the moment, but when you look back on it, your memories are also long and dense.

So far so good. So then why doesn’t a similarly dense experience get laid down when we’re watching videos on TikTok?

Here’s why: the brain needs to be able to process an event to build a memory for it. Memories aren’t laid down instantaneously, the process of laying down a new memory is called memory consolidation, and it takes place after the event has occurred. From the standpoint of memory formation, what you do after an event is almost as important as the event itself.

The Psychology of Memory Formation and Proactive Interference

Think of memory formation like the formation of muscles. The experience you’re trying to remember is the physical workout itself. When you go to the gym and work out, you don’t get the results immediately. And the time you spend after you go the gym - resting and recovering, is crucial for seeing those gains. It’s the same way with how the brain converts experiences to memory. When it comes to memory formation, the brain needs downtime. 

Imagine going to a concert. You’ve had the experience, and now the brain gets to work on converting that concert experience into memory. For the sake of those memories, the best thing you could do is rest and do nothing - give your brain that downtime it needs. This is also one of the reasons why sleep is so crucial for memory formation. In contrast, the worst thing you could do is to go to another concert which you also want to remember. The second concert experience would interfere with the memory formation for the first concert. 

This is called proactive interference: new experiences that interfere with the memory formation of older experiences. In a classic study, participants were instructed to memorize a list of paired words, e.g. face - tree, desk - hand, rose - wall, water - dog. In one group, they were given an additional list of words that bore similarities to the first e.g. nose - tree, desk - foot. Both groups were tested on the first list. The group that was given the additional words did far worse than the control group which received nothing.

proactive interference been replicated across several domains, and it appears to be a stable feature of human nature: Downtime is crucial for memory. So how does this all-important downtime manifest on TikTok?

Photo by Tili Ulta via UnSplash

This is part 2 of a multi-part series on social media, TikTok, memory, and the psychology of time. You can find part 3 here

References for The Psychology of Memory, Time, and Proactive Interference

Ben-Artzi, E., Marks, L.E. (1995) Visual-auditory interaction in speeded classification: Role of stimulus difference. Perception & Psychophysics 57, 1151–1162 (1995). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03208371

Eagleman, D. M. (2008). Human time perception and its illusions. Current opinion in neurobiology, 18(2), 131-136.

Gonidis, L., & Sharma, D. (2017). Internet and Facebook related images affect the perception of time. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 47(4), 224-231.

Klosterman, C (2022). The Nineties (p. 55). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Zheng, M. (2021, December). Influence of Short Video Watching Behaviors on Visual Short-Term Memory. In 2021 4th International Conference on Humanities Education and Social Sciences (ICHESS 2021) (pp. 1855-1859). Atlantis Press.