It’s 2005, and the computer room has been vibrating for two hours straight, my fingers gliding across the keyboard copying HTML and Java code while jamming to the latest R&B CD I burned. No, I’m not a computer programming wiz — I’m designing my MySpace page. I spend countless hours choosing the perfect song, trying to figure out why my About section header isn’t bold, and how to get those glittery GIFs to work. Although TikTok's short video format is its hallmark differentiating feature, MySpace had the potential to be as addictive as TikTok.

I was in sixth grade when MySpace became popular, and today, my niece, an avid TikTok-er, is the same age I was back then. So after spending most of the summer rejecting my niece’s urgent requests to join in on her trending TikTok dances, I did what any researcher would do — start with “me-search.” I asked my niece what her TikTok would tell someone about her that they wouldn’t otherwise know.

“I’m trendy. I’m into fashion. I like to dance,” she said.

Thinking back to my constant MySpace page redesigning, Top 8 tweaks, and song choice updates, my obsession with getting the page just right wasn’t all that different from Gen Z and Gen Alpha’s TikTok fixation.

Granted, I could easily shut down the computer, leave the room, go hang out with friends, do homework, and not think about it until a new song hit me so deeply I thought, “this should be on my page!”

In contrast, observing my niece and her friends today, I wonder why kids just can’t get off that particular app.

Yes, there have been relative social and cultural changes since the mid-2000s, but there is one inimitable variable: the COVID-19 shutdowns. We heard a lot about Gen Z or “Zoomers,” during the COVID-19 pandemic, coming of age and entering college in virtual school classrooms. But the pandemic shutdowns also forced the newest generation at the time, Gen Alpha, to interact in the virtual world. I remember my niece’s last few months of kindergarten on Zoom. For career day, she said she wanted to be a “brain doctor,” so we dressed her up as a surgeon. Watching the kids excitedly scan their classmates’ Zoom boxes to guess each other’s costumes. Between this virtual reality and TikTok’s tweaks to its algorithms and features, we have the perfect storm for what psychologists call “short video addiction.” The question becomes, should learning be made as addictive as TikTok?

Read the full article about making learning as addictive as TikTok by Mi Aniefuna at EdSurge.