how social media captures our attention

You may also have spent part of the night glued to your social networks, as if frantically absorbed. This is called “scrolling” and often, we don’t even realize how much time we spend there. From one video to another, from one publication to another, we are constantly redirected to content more absurd than the other on Instagram, Tiktok, Facebook: baby pandas cuddling, choreographies, tutorials makeup, cooking, shopping.

All of this is obviously very calculated and theorized. Among the most used techniques is the “hook”. Adeline Cointe is a communications expert : “We are going to create publications that will hook people, phish them. When you see techniques like ‘I’m going to tell you a secret’, you want to be one of the privileged people who will have access to that secret. And you you’ll stay on the video longer to discover the secret in question. Or when the content creator writes: ‘You absolutely have to hear this today’, it’s the same. It’s a technique to keep you. We wants to know what we ‘must’ know today. We are really going to be prisoners of the content and consume ever more.” Obviously, these strategies can be learned, notably through influencer agencies which advise content creators.

The hope of finding better

And if we fall straight into the trap, this is also explained from a psychological point of view. Our brain is always looking for more. It is not so much the content that is interesting but the search effect: social networks keep us in suspense. Stéphanie Ladel is an addictologist: “We scroll because it’s quite interesting but we’re looking for something better. Scrolling is the demonstration that what’s in front of us is a little interesting, but nothing more. It’s like wandering. is the mechanism of abundance, the mechanism of rather pleasant, rather pleasant. We escape, certainly, but the experience is inconclusive, so there remains hope. The human being is a living being who is guided by pleasure and through hope. And the platforms succeed in their challenge of capturing our attention and our time by playing on part of our pleasure and also part of our hope. The format of the videos fuels this hope: with a short video the Internet user does not give up. As unsatisfactory as it is, there is still hope for what comes next.