Life after TikTok: Can you ever go back to the days before ‘brain rot’?

SINGAPORE – When TikTok arrived in 2016, it caught the world of social media apps off guard.

Arguably the most significant social media innovation of the past decade, TikTok popularised a new kind of media at an unprecedented scale: short videos on an infinite scroll feed. 

By 2021, it had more than one billion monthly users, raising alarm bells over its influence and impact on mental health.

In a post-TikTok world, terms such as “doomscrolling” and “brain rot” have entered the everyday lexicon, describing the supposed mental toll of excessive social media consumption.

Some countries – notably India and the United States – have even moved to restrict or ban the app, citing concerns ranging from national security to public health.

As TikTok’s global omnipresence now hangs in the balance, The Straits Times delves into how the platform has changed the way media is consumed. And what does life after TikTok even look like?

TikTok’s passive revolution

What mainly distinguishes TikTok from its predecessors is that it pioneered a more passive and algorithm-driven way of consuming media such that viewers exert less intentionality over what they see, according to experts.

Unlike traditional platforms where users actively choose what they watch, TikTok’s infinite scroll and sophisticated recommendation algorithm create what Dr Samer Elhajjar calls a “doomscrolling culture”. He is a senior lecturer at the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) Business School.

“You can engage with bite-size content with no upfront investment,” he says. “This compulsive scrolling with quick dopamine hits is actually linked to decreased attention spans, where people struggle with longer narratives or tasks requiring deep focus.”

Dr Elhajjar notes that where once humans may have had more “boring” time to sit with their thoughts and reflect, this is no longer the case.

While the overarching impact of this loss of reflection time is not yet fully understood, some initial studies with children point to TikTok use being linked to anxiety and worse sleep and memory.

Once established, this passive consumption habit can be difficult to reverse.

Today, TikTok is no longer alone in providing an infinite feed of short videos – Instagram and YouTube have also launched similar functions. When India banned TikTok, Instagram Reels, which absorbed former TikTok users, was the primary beneficiary.

However, this revolution of passive media consumption has its benefits, say content creators.

Singaporean TikTok content creator Ng Wee Liang, 26, who creates travel and heritage videos, notes that the app was among the first to surface a diversity of content from creators you do not follow. “This introduces users to a really wide range of content they may never have thought they might have liked before,” he says.

His world broadened to take in topics such as new music genres and the dangers of cave diving. During his exchange semester abroad, TikTok was also a helpful source of cooking tips and recipes.

‘Brain rot’ and the speed of culture

While TikTok excels at grabbing attention, its ability to create lasting influence is more complex. 

Dr Zhang Renwen, assistant professor of communications at NUS, says TikTok has accelerated the speed at which trends not only emerge and spread but also fade.

The platform has become a powerful launchpad for music, movies and brands, with viral TikTok songs regularly making into the music industry’s Billboard Hot 100 chart purely from platform engagement. 

The emergence of “BookTok” also demonstrates the platform’s power in driving book sales, with bricks-and-mortar bookstores now dedicating aisles to TikTok-recommended reads. For instance, British BookTok influencer Jack Edwards’ rave review of a new edition of Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s White Nights (1848) made it a social media sensation, selling more than 50,000 copies.

But Ms Koh An Ting, a 37-year-old writer and bookseller who creates videos about books, notes that while BookTok encourages reading, it remains unclear whether its content creators actually read their own recommended books or just parroted book-sleeve blurbs.

As Dr Zhang notes, while TikTok can make something instantly recognisable, “deep cultural impact often requires sustained engagement, which short-form content doesn’t always facilitate”.

American internet researcher Adam Bumas wrote in an internet culture newsletter that TikTok has created a culture of “forgetting and rediscovering” content. Many trends, such as “mewing” – attempting to change your face shape by pressing your tongue against the roof of your mouth – have been presented as “new” numerous times since 2021.

This is due to the TikTok algorithm’s tendency to self-cannibalise, meaning users often copy past content and pass it off as their own new creations.

“The lifespan of a trend is shorter than ever,” says Dr Elhajjar. Where trends could once last for months in the cultural zeitgeist, now, virality is measured in days, he adds.

It is not just that fad cycles that have grown shorter. He says the rise of TikTok has also seen an accompanying rise in “snackable knowledge”, in which the information in complex topics is summarised into videos that are shorter than one minute.

This is a double-edged sword, says Mr Ho Yong Min, who is behind The Urbanist Singapore accounts on TikTok and Instagram. The 40-year-old tour guide and heritage educator notes that he increasingly sees young people turning to TikTok as a search engine to find knowledge that might once have been taught through a history lesson or cookbook.

He says his videos frequently elicit comments like “I wish they taught this in school” and “History lessons should look like this”.

However, crafting a 90-second video on Singapore history also means that much is left on the floor of the cutting room, along with many nuances that might over-complicate a narrative.

In a video about steps built in the Singapore Botanic Gardens by prisoners of war, Mr Ho wishes he had more time to discuss the role played by the Japanese in preventing the gardens from being destroyed in the war.

“There is a fascinating story about how the Japanese and the Brits working in the gardens cooperated with one another,” he says, but laments that such details are often lost due to the algorithm’s focus on short content.

Not RIP to long-form media yet

Dr Elhajjar says those seeking to curb the harms of overconsumption and “brain rot” should intentionally consume more long-form media such as podcasts, films, books and longer videos.

However, as TikTok evolves, the distinction between short- and long-form content grows increasingly blurry, and the two types of content are not mutually exclusive. It is now the norm for producers of long-form content to share clips and teasers on TikTok too.

Mr Michael Ng, 32, is micro-content lead of local documentary-maker Our Grandfather Story (OGS), which is behind notable long-form pieces on taboo topics such as death and homelessness. He says that while his team initially used TikTok to promote their documentaries with short teasers, they have started creating TikTok-exclusive content that are personality-driven and several minutes long.

“We’ve noticed a shift in consumer taste in which they are ready to consume content fully on that platform,” Mr Ng says. “But what we’ve found is that some story values hold true across platforms. People come to us looking for everyday, moving and heart-warming stories and that remains constant regardless of format.”

While TikTok allows him to reach new audiences, Mr Ng notes that it can also never fully replace longer-form content.

“Based on what we are doing at OGS, the market of intentional consumers is still quite enduring,” he says. “I don’t feel that the market of passive consumers is a threat that will encroach on that.”

What has changed is how TikTok has altered expectations for the video medium as a whole. Audiences no longer expect high production values and high-fidelity videos; short clips produced on a mobile phone will do.

Although TikTok has lowered the bar for video creation, it has not necessarily engendered more authentic connections, say Mr Terence Chia and Mr Haresh Tilani, co-hosts of local current affairs podcast Yah Lah But and co-founders of media company Ministry of Funny.

Mr Chia, 42, notes that those looking to return to the days of intentional media before the “brain rot” culture continue to flock to podcasts, live streams and longer videos.

“Podcasts offer a chance to provide intimacy at scale. Nobody can talk for just 15 to 30 seconds at a time and build up a meaningful relationship,” he says.

This is partly because podcasts, which typically run for an hour, can accompany you in an undemanding way as you go about your daily life, doing chores or exercising, says Mr Tilani, 41. “TikTok demands your attention and tries to lock you into the platform.”

He also sees his podcast as feeding into a broader appetite for depth in digital media.

“People have been wanting depth very acutely for the past decade or two as a counterbalance to virality and ‘clickbaity’ titles and doubling down on one side of the story as opposed to hearing from both sides,” he says, citing the increasing popularity of investigative YouTube channels and conversational interview podcasts as a sign of the thirst for depth.

“Our podcast is only one small part of it, but it’s a microcosm of what’s going on out there,” he says. “There’s a general fatigue where people want to know who politicians really are.”

“While most platforms are sanitised, podcasts are one of the platforms where you can see a bit more of a person’s character and personality,” he adds.

Yet, he acknowledges the symbiotic relationship between short- and long-form content. If not for the one- or two-minute viral clips of their podcast going viral online, some listeners would never have discovered them.

Navigating a post-TikTok world

So, is TikTok’s influence oversold or understated? The answer is probably somewhere in between, according to many like internet researcher Bumas.

Many of TikTok’s biggest trends, from viral dances to

the Stanley cup phenomenon

– which saw candy-coloured 1.1-litre stainless steel tumblers fly off the shelves – did not even originate on the platform, he writes.

What TikTok has done is create a new way of ordering and consuming content – one that increasingly swallows the space other apps and communities might have occupied in the past.

As such, Dr Zhang says it is an oversimplification to finger TikTok as the sole culprit for mental health woes and unhealthy habits.

“Hyper-stimulating and personalised content, short-term dopamine loops, addiction and loss of time... all of these might cause stress and anxiety,” she says, noting that, at the same time, TikTok also provides educational content, community building, and an avenue for creativity and self-expression.

“People should adopt more balanced, intentional approaches to using short-form video platforms, and such platforms should be designed in more ethical and responsible ways that prioritise user well-being and safety,” she adds.

As for BookTok content creator Koh, she has mixed feelings about living in a post-TikTok world.

Although the platform has garnered her up to 200,000 views for each of her readings of Singaporean author Gwee Li Sui’s Singlish translations of classic books, she laments the hours she spent doomscrolling, which had negative impacts on her own attention span and mental health.

“I’d think if TikTok went away, the world would be a better place,” she says categorically.

But now that TikTok has introduced the addictive power of short video to the world, as well as rival apps, its possible demise will not change things. “Because now, I also have YouTube.”