On my soapbox. I’m sick of Tiktok and what it’s doing to us as Americans and the human race more broadly. It’s destroying intellect and attention spans. It keeps people divided and fills their minds with trash. It keeps them locked in echo chambers.
As a poet, I follow a lot of indie authors. I really admire not only their work but their creativity with marketing. I am not sure I can do it, so I haven’t even tried yet. It looks very stressful, and I dread promoting myself. But part of the reason it’s so hard to sell books today is because of TikTok. This app, aside from being a propaganda tool and spyware from the CCP, is shortening human attention spans to the point that most people can not read a book. They can’t focus that long. Authors are now selling a product most people can’t use. Our culture is no longer a reading culture, and that’s messing us up. Yes, there’s YouTube, and YouTube is part of the problem. But there are 5 hour podcasts on YouTube. Tiktok is all short form. We are now a porngraphic society rather than an enlightened one. Social media is full of dirtiness and people behaving badly in general. It speaks to the basest parts of human nature. I know people aren’t going to want to hear this, but ask yourself if you can focus as well as well as you could ten years ago? Do the children in your life read as much or seem to focus as long as kids did when you were young? I hope your answer to these questions is yes, but for me and the vast majority of people, I suspect the answer is no on both counts. Tiktok and apps like it suck.
Being able to sustain a line of thought and focus on one topic for an extended period of time are important skills to have. Our brains are plastic, and TikTok and apps like it are rewiring them for worse, not for better.
Life at Home 