By skyforbes 
Introduction
In the last decade, no platform has captured global attention and cultural influence quite like TikTok. Launched internationally in 2017, TikTok quickly evolved from a niche lip-syncing app into a global cultural powerhouse with over one billion active users by 2021. Its defining feature — short-form video content ranging between 15 seconds and 3 minutes — revolutionized how people consume information, entertainment, and even news. Unlike long-form platforms such as YouTube or traditional television, TikTok’s brevity creates a uniquely compressed, rapid, and continuous flow of stimuli. This format not only changes viewing habits but also reshapes the way individuals perceive time itself.
Human time perception has long fascinated psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers. Unlike external, objective measurements of time, subjective time is elastic: it contracts when we are deeply immersed in an engaging activity, and it expands during boredom or discomfort. TikTok, with its endless stream of bite-sized videos, provides an unprecedented case study in how digital environments modulate temporal experience.
The central question of this article is: How do short TikTok videos alter our perception of time, attention, and cognition? To answer this, we must examine the…