A CRITIC AT LARGE - CHECK THIS OUT

If you think apps and social media are ruining our ability to concentrate, you haven't been paying attention.

- BY DANIEL IMMERWAHR

There are awards for the year's best films but not for its best TikTok videos. That's too bad, since 2024 yielded several tiny masterpieces. From @yojairyjaimee, a flawless, minute-long re-creation of some bizarre 2009 stage patter by Kanye West (who now goes by Ye). From @accountwashackedwith50m, twelve seconds of chocolate-covered strawberries, filmed from the vantage of a saxophonist in an R. & B. band. From @notkenna, seven seconds of a dog made to look, with preposterously low-budget effects, as if it were flying on a broom-stick. Such Internet gems are what the poet Patricia Lockwood has called “the sapphires of the instant”; each catches the light in a strange, hypnotic way.

Just don't stare too long. If every video is a starburst of expression, an extended TikTok session is fireworks in your face for hours. That can't be healthy, can it? In 2010, the technology writer Nicholas Carr presciently raised this concern in “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” a Pulitzer Prize finalist. “What the Net seems to be doing,” Carr wrote, “is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.”

He recounted his increased difficulty reading longer works. He wrote of a highly accomplished philosophy student—indeed, a Rhodes Scholar—who didn't read books at all but gleaned what he could from Google. That student, Carr ominously asserted, “seems more the rule than the exception.”

Carr set off an avalanche. Much read works about our ruined attention include Nir Eyal's “Indistractable,” Johann Hari's “Stolen Focus,” Cal Newport's “Deep Work,” and Jenny Odell's “How to Do Nothing.” Carr himself has a new book, “Superbloom,” about not only distraction but all the psychological harms of the Internet. We've suffered a “fragmentation of consciousness,” Carr writes, our world having been “rendered incomprehensible by information.”