TikTok’s sludge content isn’t just for short attention spans
Someone is kinetically chopping sand into neat, even cubes next to a clip of Family man. The jumping, coin-collecting gameplay of Subway surfers plays along with a segment of a Twitch stream. Slime is coiled and stretched alongside a reupload of someone else’s POV sketch.
This kind of collage videos – also known as “sludge content” – that play completely different images side by side is rampant on TikTok. But they have also been shared on other platforms wherever they are become a meme in and of itself. Often that attention is negative, especially about the perceived attention span of younger internet users.
Am I old or is something very wrong here? An tweet, with a video divided three ways Subway surfers gameplay, an episode of Family man, and someone who shovels and cuts sensory sand. “This is what your nephew watches 14 hours a day,” says anothercaption of a video splitting another Family man clip with footage of what appears to be Jump girl, a silly endless runner game in which the protagonist bounces against various items, including men and giant eggplants. The audio clip for this video is borderline unlistenable, a robot reading a (possibly fake) Reddit post with multiple sound effects and “Cat’s in the Cradle” by Harry Chapin.
But neither video in these tweets is as simple as it seems. The latter is perhaps a more obvious parody of the trend. But the first one was posted by the official Subway surfers TikTok account, taking advantage of the 10 years old endless runner mobile games sudden increase in popularity by posting a TikTok collage that exaggerated the style with three video clips instead of the usual two. The trend has reached the point of saturation where prominent streamers and brands have joined in, often willfully mocking the trend. But it’s not always easy to tell whether the collages are meant to be ironic or not – and they seem to be a successful engagement strategy anyway.
For example, streamer and political commentator Hasan Piker’s account, run by editor Ostonox, posted a video in January that was quartered. On the left, a clip of Piker and the video he was responding to stream plays. On the right, the video showed brightly colored cylinders of kinetic sand Subway surfers game. “It both satirized the current trend and allowed viewers to watch something visually stimulating while still listening,” says Ostonox.
Ostonox compares this multitasking to something like doing chores while listening to a podcast. And anecdotal evidence suggests the trend is capturing people’s attention. Despite the mostly negative response to the parody tweets above, there’s no reason to doubt the commenters who report that their little cousins and other young relatives actually watch this kind of content. In the comments to Piker’s video, viewers have left comments like “you were right, this format really makes me watch the whole video” and “I hate to say it, but I’m much more engaged this way. “
“It certainly led to a lot more engagement than usual,” says Ostonox. Part of the increased reach may be due to more comments – people wanted to talk about the meme and their experiences with its effects. But Ostonox also saw a longer viewing time. “I definitely need to test the method more.”
They take it easy though, as both Piker and Ostonox were forbidden for the mail. They believe its virality led trolls to report the account en masse, with TikTok eventually citing “hate speech” as the reason for the ban. Piker was able to recover his account after contacting the platform.
Ultimately, it’s not surprising that collage-style videos have taken off on TikTok, a platform that can already display two videos at once thanks to its built-in “duet” feature. In this way, the audience is already prepared to multitask. And the precedent for the style of editing techniques used in these collage videos already exists on other video platforms.
While TikTok has popularized the dual-video format, third-party content merging has long been a staple of YouTube. Fragments of Family man have in particular flourished in the form of “best of” and “funniest moment” compilations thanks to editing solutions such as sharp cuts, unrelated clips, and zoomed-in crops that seem to have helped such videos avoid getting caught up in copyright claims. It is plausible that TikTok’s collage trend, with its similar techniques and even similar reliance on the cartoon, also helps these videos avoid being picked up by tagging algorithms.
There is also an element of clout in the format. Some of these collage videos often feature re-uploaded viral TikToks, allowing creators to capitalize on their popularity to get more views. And people can make these collages quite easily and quickly by simply splicing clips together, making it a relatively easy way to grab a share of the creator fund payout. That not only encourages the format itself, but also encourages making as many as possible.
But it’s easier to point to the supposed “attention span reduction” as a reason why these TikToks have grown in popularity than these alternative motivations for creators. Without the broader context, these videos seem to be a symptom of a population that can’t stop looking at one thing at a time. And yet studies on the truth of the attention span and impact of this kind of internet content are hard to come by. Oft-cited attention studies can appear to be faint, and more research is needed. Yet smartphones have made media multitasking commonplace. Many of us scroll through social media while watching TV or listen to a podcast while gaming, for example.
That is why Dr. Bjørn Nansen, researcher of digital media, calls the collage videos “an interesting and important, but also not unexpected phenomenon”. Where once a child played a game on one screen and watched TikTok on another, it makes sense to Nansen that creators would try to collapse these boundaries.
The fact that these collages often include video clips that are sensory or tactile, such as repetitive mobile gameplay or satisfying slime clips, is also “understandable” to Nansen. “This kind of content easily fades into the background […] and thus [is] well suited to accompany other, more attention-grabbing content,” he says.
This also seems to be the experience of many viewers. “Lots of comments [on the collage video] talk about how the multiple videos made it easier for them to watch and record some [Piker] said about the meaning of the phrase ‘Black lives matter’ versus the reactionary counterpart of ‘all lives matter’,” says Ostonox.
It’s also not entirely clear how this kind of multitasking affects attention and information retention. Some studies suggest that we are less likely to remember details of what we viewed while multitasking. But a viewer who doesn’t grasp all the nuances of Piker’s argument may know even more than one who got impatient, scrolled away, and didn’t hear his point at all. And for most TikToks, the topic isn’t that serious – no matter how well someone scrolling for fun understands the details of the Family man clip they just saw.
And as Nansen points out, collages are an artistic medium in their own right. Placing different images next to each other leads to new experiences for the viewer. “Maybe we can think of these digital media collages as […] reshaping notions of media products as contained, single, [and] differentiated,” he says. The ultimate reality is that media multitasking is a widespread practice, making our experiences “much more open, unfinished, undifferentiated, [and] ongoing.” The collage trend could be a way to express that both artistically and functionally.