Social Media is Making Us All Very Dumb

[Listen to an audio version of this blog here.]

There was a challenge to see if anyone could drink a can of sparkling water without burping. There was a Lizzo song (“About Damn Time”) with a dance that everyone replicated over and over and over again. There is a couple that got famous for pranking each other, although the pranks were not that funny and barely believable. There was the Pink Slime and the bad mommy bloggers and Modern Warrior and the Corn Kid and dramatic breakups. Tik Tok took the internet by storm, and it quickly became the fastest growing social media app.

TikTok was previously Musical.ly, where people would upload lip-synch videos. In 2018, a Chinese tech company, ByteDance, acquired Musical.ly and merged it with its own lip-synching app, known as Douyin. The result was TikTok, which some describe as “collaborative,” others describe as “combative,” and fewer choose to ignore entirely.

But Tik Tok isn’t the only platform capturing attention. Worldwide, there are 4.6 billion social media users. Facebook remains the largest, with 2.9 billion users, and the average user is on social media for over two and half hours each day. The average social media user is on six different platforms, each one fighting for attention. Attention continues to be the underlying problem with social media; while you might not think…