I've got a hypothesis that the reason short-form video like TikTok became dominant is because of the decline in reading instruction (eg. usage of whole-word instruction over phonics) that started in 1998-2000. The timing largely lines up: the rise of video content started around 2013, just as these kids were entering their teenage years. Media has significant economies of scale and network effects (i.e. it is much more profitable to target the lowest common denominator than any niche group), and so if you get a large number of teenagers who have difficulty with reading, media will adjust to provide them content that they can consume effortlessly.
Anecdotally, I hear lots of people talking about the short attention span of Zoomers and Gen Alpha (which they define as 2012+; I'd actually shift the generation boundary to 2017+ for the reasons I'm about to mention). I don't see that with my kid's 2nd-grade classmates: many of them walk around with their nose in a book and will finish whole novels. They're the first class after phonics was reintroduced in the 2023-2024 kindergarten year; every single kid knew how to read by the end of kindergarten. Basic fluency in skills like reading and math matters.
The short-form video craze started in the U.S. though, right? And with firms like Vine and SnapChat rather than TikTok. Like I said, media (particularly social media) has strong network effects, so if you get a critical mass of early users you can take over the rest of the population even if the initial spark that attracted them doesn't apply to the rest of the world. Same as how Facebook started out at the most prestigious dorm in the most prestigious college of the U.S. - by the time it got to senior citizens they don't care about college prestige, but they got on because their grandchildren were sharing their photos on it, and the reason the grandchildren got on was because they wanted to be cooler.
I recognize this is very anecdotal (your observation and mine), but my gen alpha daughter approaching the teenage phase always has her head in a book. She also has a very short attention span.
That was also roughly the time period where mobile phones and their networks started to become reliably able to stream video at scale. That seems like a more plausible proximate cause for the timing of the rise of TikTok.
That’s ridiculously US-centric. TikTok is a global phenomenon initiated by a Chinese company. Nothing would be different in the grand scale if there were zero American TikTok users.
Anecdotally, I hear lots of people talking about the short attention span of Zoomers and Gen Alpha (which they define as 2012+; I'd actually shift the generation boundary to 2017+ for the reasons I'm about to mention). I don't see that with my kid's 2nd-grade classmates: many of them walk around with their nose in a book and will finish whole novels. They're the first class after phonics was reintroduced in the 2023-2024 kindergarten year; every single kid knew how to read by the end of kindergarten. Basic fluency in skills like reading and math matters.