Every social media user has experienced the theft of their time. You may log on to quickly check your notifications, and before you know it, half an hour has gone by, and you’re still on the platform, unable to account for where the time went. This phenomenon even has a name: the “30-minute ick factor.” It also has empirical support. Experiments have found that people using apps like TikTok and Instagram start to underestimate the time they’re on such platforms after just a few minutes of use, even when they’re explicitly told to keep track of time.
To understand how social media warps time, we must understand time perception, or chronoception. Generally, an event feels longer in the moment if it heightens awareness. But we seldom think of time in the moment; the majority of our sense of time is retrospective. And our sense of retrospective time is determined by awareness of the past: in other words, by memory. The more we remember of a certain period, the longer that period feels, and the slower time seems to have passed.
