Hannah Ewens was mid-conversation with a stranger at a party when she caught the narration running underneath it: hurry up, get to the point, you’re going to say this, then that, and what is the takeaway here? The thought did not feel like hers. Ewens is a journalist who describes herself as endlessly curious about people, and over the preceding months she had watched that curiosity thin — irritation at loved ones edging toward an anecdote she thought she had already heard, a heroic effort required to stay with an interview that was not “truly stimulating.”
She knew where it came from. Going freelance at the start of the year meant working from home full-time, and with it hours of the working day spent in Instagram reels, which the app now pushes into feeds as the majority of what users see. The content was algorithmically tuned to her interests, and it had started competing with the people in front of her. “Subconsciously, I had begun to expect conversations to provide speed, relevance and the ability for me to skip through at will.”
The piece is a first-person column rather than a research report, and it earns its generalisation the way columns do — through recognition. The online/offline split is a false one, Ewens notes, so it would be strange if the pace of the feed did not bleed into the pace of talk. A friend confessed she could no longer bear irrelevant information in conversation; another said it would be convenient to skip and speed through interactions the way you do reel to reel. Ewens’ boyfriend, who does not use social media, found the whole account repulsive — as bad, in his view, as her habit of watching video at double speed.
What the study says
There is some evidence underneath the intuition. A 2023 paper by Francesco Chiossi and colleagues at LMU Munich, “Short-Form Videos Degrade Our Capacity to Retain Intentions,” found that context-switching between short videos weakens prospective memory — the ability to hold onto something you meant to do after an interruption.
That matters for conversation specifically, because talking requires exactly those two things: retaining what was said and holding your intention to reply. Chiossi told Ewens her experience was a textbook case of the impatience short-form content breeds. “The deeper we try to go, the more information we have to retain and the more impatient we become.” The compensation is visible in any group of people: switching topics, interrupting, drifting off, or picking up the pace because we believe — often wrongly — that we have already processed what is being said.
Retraining for friction
Ewens also asked a sociolinguist what to do about it. Marissa Fond, of Georgetown University, suggested noticing the state you are in rather than fighting it: take a deep breath, recognise that you are participating in a practice you dislike, slow down, and try to engage your curiosity about the person or the content in front of you. Retrain yourself for the friction and pace of life.
Ewens’ own remedies are modest — stopping the self-berating, deleting the apps on days off, and remembering that the technologists who build these products tend to keep their own children away from them. Her closing image is the useful one. Good conversation is not content: it does not arrive with a hook or a frenetic pace, its takeaway is usually submerged in more questions, and it is not sparky like electricity but tidal, two people pushing and pulling until something unique forms between them. Sometimes it is boring. Often it is beautiful, if you have the patience for it.
The column does not claim to prove a causal story, and the strongest material in it is anecdotal. Its argument is narrower and harder to dismiss: attention is a habit, habits are trainable in both directions, and the training most of us now receive is for skipping.