TikTok and social media in general has changed the attention span of teens. The amount of time teens spend on social media has increased over time, with some teens spending most of their awake hours on social media each day.
Sophomore Vy Nguyen said she spends hours each day on the app.
“It depends if I’m at school or not, but maybe three to four hours a day,” Nguyen said.
According to The Oxford Blue, that is two hours more than the average person spends on TikTok in the United States.
“Before I started using TikTok and apps like that, my attention span was longer, but then after TIktok, the videos are shorter, so my attention span has also gotten shorter,” Nguyen said. Before I started using TikTok and apps like that, my attention span was longer, but then after TIktok, the videos are shorter, so my attention span has also gotten shorter. — Vy Nguyen, 10
The amount of time spent on TikTok varies, but there are people who spend two to four hours a day on TikTok per day, according to The Oxford Blue.
“I probably spend one to two hours a day on TikTok,” freshman William Becker said.
That’s around the normal amount spent on TikTok a day in the United States, according to socialmediapsychology.eu.
“My attention has changed a little bit,” Becker said. “Sometimes I feel like I’m paying more attention to my phone instead of class. I think TikTok is an easy way to spend time on your phone, and I don’t feel like we are as present in the classroom.”
Becker said he feels like he can’t focus in class because of TikTok, and he feels the need to get on his phone instead of paying attention to what’s happening in class.
“This is my eleventh year teaching, and my first year teaching there was things like Twitter, but not a whole lot of people were using it because not a whole lot of people had phones, but now middle schoolers have phones,” math teacher Jake Schirmer said. “The idea of just moving on to the next video if you don’t like something is jeopardizing the way of thinking through things instead of just moving on to the next thing.”
Teachers like Schirmer are worried that TikTok might make it hard for students to pay attention in class. Finding the right balance between using social media and focusing on schoolwork is becoming more important for teenagers.
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