Youtube is too good at keeping me watching things on Youtube. I see something interesting and think, “I should probably get back to my homework, but it is only a minute long so it couldn’t hurt.” Then there’s the disembodied voice of a french man saying, “…five hours later,” and my day is gone. It’s the age old problem of just one more distilled to one movement of my hand. I put my hand in the cookie jar, and the cookies are not letting go.

Now, although it is very easy to be sucked into the Sarlack pit that is Youtube, I have been able to keep the distraction it causes to a minimum. Until this week. I’m sure you’ve heard of the social media app Vine. It is basically the definition of snippets of entertainment. I don’t have a Vine, I just missed the boat on it and decided it wasn’t worth the swim to catch up. So, I don’t have Vine but Youtube does! What I mean by that is that there are whole youtube channels dedicated to curating the best of Vine and releasing it in monthly chunks. It’s like crack for your eyeballs, with six second scenes of hilarity that are about as easy to resist as not eating from a bowl of popcorn. I know I’m full, but my hand still has a mind of its own and I just keep putting the stuff in my gob. I watched 2 straight hours of these six second portions of content. That’s 1,200 vines, and there’s still a lot more. I even saw a bunch of Vines with the Property Brother’s in them, the set of twins from HGTV.

The clips are so short, the distraction so concentrated, that you aren’t given time to think. It’s just an onslaught of stimulation that sucks me in. Combine this with my tab problem and it’s a recipe for disaster. I managed to snap out of it this morning, but then I was hungry. I decided that I couldn’t study while I ate, so I put on another video. I followed Alice and her vertical videos down the rabbit hole.

It really makes me wonder whether or not this kind of thing is affecting my ability to concentrate in the real world. If I become accustomed to a type of media that provides near constant stimulation, how can I expect to be able to watch things in long-form? It could even influence my personality, I could become more impatient or in a state of constant boredom from the stimulation fallout.

Vine’s meteoric growth in popularity has changed the lives of those people who have become “Vine famous.” It seems to me that it’s affecting the lives of a lot of it’s users too though. Youtube provides a constant stream of compilations, but the app itself allows you to scroll ad infinitum through the clips. It’s a level of distraction that really could not have existed before the internet. Snapchat, Instagram, and twitter are all culprits as well. Each one has their own form of attraction and validation for their users.

So I’m sitting in my room writing this. At the end of every paragraph I’ve looked at my phone to answer some texts. Then I see I have received a snapchat so I go check that out, and while I’m there I watch all of the snapchat stories of my friends. By then the people I am texting have replied so I text them back again. Hopefully during that time I don’t browse through my tabs, or refreshing my subscription feed on youtube. Vine is my current poison but the internet is really the drug dealer. There are so many benefits to the way that the internet connects people; but this mundane bombardment of distractions, from so many sources, makes focusing my ADD brain, on any task that does not provide instant gratification, a losing battle. The fact that the view counts on these videos ranges from six hundred thousand to in the millions is really a testament to their appeal. I can’t be the only person who gets distracted like this, and I really don’t know a viable solution now that I do all of my homework on a huge internet portal. I have about as much chance as a dyslexic, sixteen year old boy has trying to read the Odyssey in a strip club.