Every social media user has experienced the theft of their time. You may log on to quickly check your notifications, and before you know it, half an hour has gone by, and you’re still on the platform, unable to account for where the time went. This phenomenon even has a name: the “30-minute ick factor.” It also has empirical support. Experiments have found that people using apps like TikTok and Instagram start to underestimate the time they’re on such platforms after just a few minutes of use, even when they’re explicitly told to keep track of time.
To understand how social media warps time, we must understand time perception, or chronoception. Generally, an event feels longer in the moment if it heightens awareness. But we seldom think of time in the moment; the majority of our sense of time is retrospective. And our sense of retrospective time is determined by awareness of the past: in other words, by memory. The more we remember of a certain period, the longer that period feels, and the slower time seems to have passed.
Sometimes an experience can seem brief in the moment but long in memory, and vice versa. A classic example is the “holiday paradox”: While on vacation, time speeds by because you’re so overwhelmed by new experiences that you don’t keep track of time. But when you return from your vacation, it suddenly feels longer in retrospect, because you made many strong memories.
Conversely, when you’re waiting at a boring airport, you keep checking the clock, and this acute awareness of time causes it to pass slowly in the moment. But since the wait is uneventful, you don’t make strong memories of the experience, and so, in retrospect, it seems brief.
A sinister thing about social media is that it speeds up your time both in the moment and in retrospect. It does this by simultaneously impairing your awareness of the present and your memory of the past.