Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines short-video scrolling as a sociotechnical practice that reshapes everyday temporal rhythms. With insights from Ihde, Lefebvre, and STS, it explores how algorithms and interface design become entangled with users’ experience of time.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines short-video scrolling practices (Instagram Reels, TikTok, YouTube Shorts) as sites where everyday time is calibrated through sociotechnical mediation. Rather than approaching scrolling as distraction or addiction, I conceptualize it as a rhythmic practice through which digital infrastructures participate in ordering duration, repetition, and obligation in daily life.

The analysis brings together Don Ihde’s postphenomenology, Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis, and Science and Technology Studies to investigate how temporal experience emerges through human–technology relations. Interface features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, algorithmic recommendation, and metric feedback participate in shaping and mediating how users experience pauses, transitions, and interruptions within everyday routines.

Based on in-depth interviews with active short-video users, the study traces how scrolling becomes incorporated into cyclical rhythms (fatigue, sleep), linear rhythms (work, study), and social rhythms (messaging, shared viewing). These interactions produce shifting alignments and tensions between bodily limits, platform logics, and temporal expectations. Moments of “rupture,” such as sudden awareness of time loss, moral self-questioning, or algorithmic misalignment, render otherwise invisible forms of technological mediation perceptible.

I argue that short-video platforms operate as temporal infrastructures that calibrate everyday rhythms through ongoing human–algorithm interaction. Users respond through self-regulation techniques and narrative rationalizations that stabilize or contest this sociotechnical arrangement. By foregrounding temporal mediation and rhythmic ordering, the paper shows how everyday time is co-produced through relations between users, algorithms, and interface infrastructures.