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| Chyung Eun-ju |
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| Joel Cho |
By Chyung Eun-ju and Joel Cho
People are supergluing costume vampire fangs to their teeth, eating cereal from another person’s mouth and peeing in their pants. The goal is to make viral TikTok videos. As time passes, the videos on TikTok are becoming more ludicrous and also quite harmful as they seem to be emulating the American TV series franchise “Jackass.” A female TikTokker ended up in the hospital after styling her hair with gorilla glue, a 13-year-old boy died doing the Benadryl challenge, and teen drivers suffered car accidents after performing the “Cha-Cha Slide” challenge (swerving all over the road ). Essentially, the success formula for TikTok seems to be: the crazier the video, the more views (at the cost of your safety, no less).
We tried to do some simple voice-over challenges on TikTok, and just a simple voice-over took around 30 minutes to film 20 takes, and it was not even on par with the other voice-over videos that were already viral. The amount of time we spent to make a simple 15-second video was quite exhausting, but imagine trying to nail a TikTok trend. A couple of days ago, a teenager was walking around his friend who was frozen in place in a mall, for hours. They would review each shot of the video and shoot again to achieve a video for the “Frozen in Place” trend, where you have to freeze in place, while a police car siren sound plays in the background. Nowadays, we can see more and more people filming TikTok videos on the street for hours, without perceiving how it may look to the public.
In our tech-saturated world, we constantly seek short and quick thrills. With today’s competition for attention, we find ourselves pushed to more extreme measures. Entertainment is in the palm of our hands, and the moment we unlock our screens, our minds dive into another hyper-social realm. This addictive world offers quick pleasure, via human dopamine release, and we, as a generation, have grown up in its embrace. Successful social interactions are known to release dopamine, and it’s in this context that tech companies monetize our dopamine-driven need for social validation.
Researchers and experts often emphasize the importance of spending less time on social media or taking a digital detox. However, our minds do not heed this advice, or even when we do make an effort, we quickly end up back on our smartphones. This is partly because we are deeply immersed in this digital world, and technology continues to evolve with more engaging features designed to provide us with a constant supply of dopamine. Thus, advice to disconnect from our devices or reconnect with nature is all but futile.
The recent book “Trend Korea 2024,” published in October, highlighted that 10 keywords summarize the country’s socioeconomic and consumer trends. Among the 10, three keywords – dopamine farming, time efficient society and hexagonal humans – got us thinking, is it just time to simply embrace this digital immersion?
Our generation is the first generation that is experiencing the side effects of smartphones. We suffer from depression and anxiety but more than that, just as the keywords that surfaced in “Trend Korea 2024,” we are time-sensitive perfectionists heavily reliant on instant gratification.
According to an article published by Thomas Curran and Andrew P. Hill in the Psychological Bulletin, millennials strive for perfection more so than other generations mostly because of social media.
This pursuit of perfection and the influence of social media has contributed to a phenomenon known as dopamine farming, which affects our behavior and how we engage with content. Dopamine farming refers to our inclination to seek quick dopamine spikes even if they appear reckless. Which seems to make us time-sensitive and forces us to use our time efficiently. So people no longer watch videos at the original speed, but rather watch at double speed, or prefer watching key plays of basketball games rather than the whole game, resulting in the “TikTok brain” (the inability to focus on long-form communication/content). Even YouTube has now made “YouTube shorts” which appear to give instant gratification within 15 seconds.
Furthermore, due to their constant exposure to content that fosters social comparisons, users have coined the term hexagonal human. This term describes individuals who excel in six key characteristics: family background, wealth, appearance, occupation, educational background and personality. A hexagonal human is someone with all six reference axes completely filled. This heightened emphasis on factors like being born into wealth is amplified in an environment with limited opportunities for upward social mobility, as noted by Kim Ran-do, a professor of consumer science at Seoul National University.
Maybe the answer lies in working on a way to navigate through this digital immersion. We should start addressing how to be mentally healthy despite all the negative side effects of spending more time with our smartphones. It is common knowledge that smartphones have become an extension of ourselves. And in the near future, we may be spending most of our time as avatars in the metaverse. Entitled "AI Won't Replace Humans ― But Humans With AI Will Replace Humans Without AI," as stated in a Harvard Business Review article, we should start thinking of ways to become healthy digital humans, without having to act like a “Jackass.”
Chyung Eun-ju (ejchyung@snu.ac.kr) is a marketing analyst at Career Step. She received a bachelor's degree in business from Seoul National University and a master's degree in marketing from Seoul National University. Joel Cho (joelywcho@gmail.com) is a practicing lawyer specializing in IP and digital law.
