Digital Switching - Boring!

One of the many new time-taking activities afforded to us by our ever-present smartphones is scrolling through online videos and reels. If you only take into account the YouTube video platform, about three-point-seven million new videos are uploaded every day. Talk about a rabbit-hole! Add to that Instagram and tiktok videos, and we could spend a lifetime looking at people scaring other people, people trying to back boats down boatramps, and cats doing whatever silly stuff cats do. A new study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology has found that swiping through online videos to relieve boredom may actually make people more bored and less satisfied or engaged with the content. This is caused primarily by our habit of digital switching, or watching only short snippets rather than complete videos. What would happen if rather than engaging in this digital switching, we invested our time engaging with real-life family and friends? Would that relieve our boredom?