The Death of Resolution
What short-form video is doing to stories, meaning, and attention
There was plenty of fear to go around in Cold War America. My middle school had a fallout shelter. We watched 8mm films warning us to “Duck” (under our desks) and “Cover” (our ears) if the Russians ever nuked our town of 4,000. In high school I read A Canticle for Leibowitz and The Martian Chronicles. In college we saw The Day After and WarGames, along with older standbys like Fail-Safe and Godzilla.
All of these encounters inspired fear. Nuclear war was a very real possibility at the time. But when the book ended and the credits rolled, I went out to the playground, the library, or the keg. The fear was contained. The story moved toward resolution. Comedies, tragedies, and adventure films all ended with some form of closure. It might not be happy, but it was unquestionably an ending.
Today, fear has become background noise. Our phones and laptops give us constant exposure to distraction and stimulation. Our social media feeds are filled with frightened people predicting horrible endings. We see bloody catastrophes minutes after they happen. We learn of tragedies and losses to the sound of a notification chime.
We used to experience fear in stories. Now we experience it in fragments.
Traditional storytelling builds tension, resolves it, and leaves meaning behind. From Sophocles to Stephen Spielberg, we have relied on structures that produce a sense of coherence, clarity, and a resolution—the completion of an experience over time.
In tragedies like Oedipus Rex or operas like Peter Grimes, the protagonist is brought to a bitter end. Romantic films typically end with the lovers united, often with the promise of a life together. However it arrives, the ending provides closure.
One of the defining features of modern art is its challenge of established conventions. Surrealism challenges bourgeois notions of reality and logic. Serialist musicians like Arnold Schoenberg and Karlheinz Stockhausen sought freedom from what Schoenberg called “the tyranny of tonality.” Bebop jazz musicians used melodies and chord progressions as a jumping-off point for intricate group improvisation.
But these artists weren’t looking to destroy structure so much as test its limits. They wanted to discover how far they could move beyond established boundaries and what they might find on the fringes. Their divergences strengthened the work and their journeys remained within a format that creates tension, led to climax, and resolved in the end.
In the “Now the Great Bear and Pleiades” aria, Grimes is a half step off key. Benjamin Britten uses dissonance to highlight how Grimes is set apart from the other villagers. Modern films increasingly feature antiheroes—charismatic, complex figures who blur the line between hero and villain. They may use new techniques and challenge old ideas, but they remain grounded on traditional foundations.
Today, a different form dominates our attention. It does not build toward a climax or move toward an ending. It does not explain, edify, or entertain. It asks only to be watched.
Clips, reels, and fragments now fill our screens. They begin in the middle of something, deliver a moment of intensity, and end without conclusion. A confrontation, a joke, a shock. A burst of outrage or satisfaction. Then another video arrives. There is no expectation that these moments will add up to a unified whole. They do not resolve; they are simply replaced.
These clips may be drawn from films, television, or TikTok. You may see the same segment several times, each time with different titles: NEVER HUMILIATE A SPECIAL FORCES MAN; GREEN BERET TEACHES BAD GUY A LESSON; MESSING WITH THIS MAN WAS A MISTAKE.
Many fragments lack even that tenuous connection to reality. They are AI-generated morality tales designed to provoke emotion. A celebrity humiliates a bully. A prisoner refuses freedom after a lifetime behind bars. There is no resolution, only a burst of feeling.
The responses become part of the cycle. Some reply with “CERTIFIED AI BULLSHIT” and similar memes, but the reaction itself becomes engagement. The feed does not distinguish between belief and disbelief. It registers only attention.
One response to a fabricated video captured the mindset perfectly:
This story might not be true, but it ought to be.
The remark was meant as a defense, but it reveals something deeper. I no longer recall the fragment. It might have been a firefighter rescuing a puppy, a bully slapped down by a smaller man, or a racist police officer humiliated by a Black FBI agent. The content is as irrelevant as its veracity. It felt right. In the world of short-form video, truth is secondary to reaction.
Their structure is closer to pornography than to traditional film: a sequence of heightened moments, stripped of context, designed for immediate response rather than sustained engagement. The viewer is not asked to follow a story, only to react to a moment.
Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.
Aristotle, Poetics VI
Classic drama provides what Aristotle called catharsis, a purging of pent-up emotions. We pity the protagonist’s sufferings. We tremble as we realize their sufferings could be ours. And we resolve our feelings as the players resolve the story. Resolution gives us emotional processing, distance, and closure.
Video clips give us fear in pieces. There is no beginning and no end. The action begins and ends in media res. We experience the emotional payload in fragments. There is no completion, no ornamentation, and no magnitude. On a video feed fear does not unfold; it recurs.
Violence, outrage, and catastrophe draw attention. Attention draws eyeballs. You find yourself watching fistfights, injustice, and rage bait. The algorithm picks up on your viewing habits and soon your video feed is an endless scroll of scenes that raise your blood pressure and adrenaline levels.
You never receive a sense of closure. All you get is a constant supply of images, shorn of context and scale. You internalize that violence and begin to feel like you are under constant threat. Your brain may know that these images are not real, but your reactions have already decided they ought to be.
As Marshall McLuhan observed, “the medium is the message.” The form of a medium shapes not only what we see, but how we experience it. Short-form video does not simply deliver content in smaller pieces. It restructures experience itself—isolating moments, removing context, and replacing resolution with repetition.
So what happens to a world exposed to constant unstructured stimulus?
A 2023 study on cognitive overload and anxiety found that cognitive overload can lead to feelings of worry, tension, apprehension, and frustration. Extended exposure to rapid, fragmented stimuli can overwhelm our capacity for attention and processing. This not only increases anxiety: it also makes individuals more likely to avoid effortful analysis in favor of simpler inputs with a lower cognitive demand.
We see this dynamic in online discourse. Dense, long-form content and nuanced analysis require attention, memory, and interpretation. Under cognitive strain many begin building their worldview from memes and short, simple, easily-processed narratives.
This is not limited to any one platform or political perspective. Cognitive overload does not concern itself with voting records or preferred social media hangouts. Fatigued minds seek out compressed narratives that can be grasped at a glance. They do not require analysis; they supply it. And that analysis is often reduced to simple signals of threat, outrage, and vindication.
This does not mean our situation is hopeless and that Western Civilization is doomed to death by TikTok. Nor are short-form reels the only drain on our attention. What we are facing is a disruptive technology that changes the way we engage with reality. Clips have not caused our free-floating anxiety any more than Gutenberg caused the Reformation. But as with the printing press, we’re still struggling to grasp the full implications of our latest invention.
So what happens next?
To learn more about the future, let’s take a look at the past.
Many clips come from longer films. The first motion pictures were clips. They didn’t tell stories, they presented spectacles: a train arriving at a station; workers leaving a factory; dancing girls; saloon brawls. Like today’s clips, they did not require structure or resolution. The experience of the new technology was enough.
As the medium developed, filmmakers began shaping these images into narratives. Like stage plays and novels, movies were built on scenes and driven by tension and resolution. Moving pictures evolved from a novelty to a new art form.
From running horses on a penny Kinetoscope viewer to Technicolor films in grand cinemas, movies were occasional experiences. They were viewed in dedicated spaces at scheduled times. The spectacle grew more impressive, but it always functioned within set boundaries.
Today the fragments do not end. They follow us from screen to screen, promising us stimulus whenever we crave distraction. What was once a novelty has become ever-present.
W2XCW, America’s first television station, began broadcasting in 1927 from General Electric’s Schenectady facility. A television cost $75—roughly two months’ wages for an average worker. For that investment, viewers could watch blurry images on a three-inch screen. The station had few viewers and served primarily as a demonstration of GE’s cutting-edge capabilities
As more TV stations came online in the 1930s, wealthy enthusiasts in urban areas took advantage of the new technology. Television remained a novelty and a status symbol rather than a mainstream media outlet. Most Americans still turned to radio for news and entertainment.
After the war, that began to change. Amidst the postwar economic boom, many people found themselves with disposable income. Luxuries that once would have been unthinkable were now achievable with a bit of thrift and savings.
In 1950 only 9 percent of American homes had televisions; by 1954 that number had risen to 55 percent; in 1960 televisions could be found in 9 out of 10 American homes. What was once an expensive novelty had become a fixture. Families gathered around their sets for news and entertainment. The nation watched as Kennedy debated Nixon; it mourned when it learned that Kennedy had been shot.
Many critics worried about television’s rise. They complained that the “idiot box” led to passive consumption and the decline of reading. On May 9, 1961, FCC Chairman Newton Minow told the National Association of Broadcasters:
I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.
Minow’s criticism was not entirely unfounded. Television often favored formulaic scripts, recycled plots, and easy consumption. For every Twilight Zone or Leave it to Beaver there were clunkers like My Mother the Car and Tom Corbett—Space Cadet.
But those who blamed television for a nation’s ills missed many other contributing factors. Television certainly reshaped America. But so did postwar prosperity, interstate highways, mass production, and the rise of advertising. American social tensions appeared on television in shows like M*A*S*H* and All in the Family. But they were representations of existing issues, not their cause.
For all its flaws, television still told stories—and stories, however simple, still ended. Variety shows might seem shapeless, but every skit had a definitive ending and every musical number a conclusion. And as with movies, TV shows aired at set times on specific stations. That is no longer the case.
So what will become of clip culture?
Television created new opportunities for creative professionals. It also gave rise to a great deal of bad programming. The same could be said of movies. For every good film, there are dozens of bad ones and hundreds of soon-to-be-forgotten mediocrities. We believe in cinematic or televised “Golden Ages” only because we have forgotten the dross.
Every clip depends on an original source. Today making and distributing high-quality long-form content is easier—and cheaper—than ever. But the platforms reward immediacy, repetition, and engagement, not completion and depth. This will not kill long-form content any more than television killed cinema. But it does mean that, now as then, media will change and adapt as they engage with each other.
Today advertisers use search engine optimization to find keywords that will rank on search queries. Tomorrow’s filmmakers may take a similar approach, designing scenes to function as “clipbait”—moments that can be extracted, shared, and circulated across platforms. Instead of resisting this fragmentation, they may work with it, using clips as entry points that lead viewers back to the full work.
We may also find that clip culture reshapes society’s expectations for coherence and resolution. Long-form content may become a niche offering and a social market of prestige. Entertainment will be seen in terms of immediate reward and the tension/resolution cycle may seem as outmoded as barbershop quartets.
That being said, there is still a market for barbershop quartets—and just about every other kind of entertainment you can imagine. The Internet has given the world access to all sorts of obscure information. What changes is not their existence, but their meaning.
The original beatniks listened to bebop jazz. They adopted sunglasses, berets, goatees, and other fashion accessories popular in the jazz scene. They also dabbled in some of the jazz scene’s more visible vices, notably marijuana and heroin. To beatniks, this signaled sophistication and rebellion. For critics, they proved the scene was filled with drug-addled poseurs making noise and calling it art.
A generation later, hippies followed a similar path and received an equally hostile reaction. Rock musicians were mocked with the same anger and often with the same cliches. Like bebop, rock often sounded chaotic to outsiders and was dismissed as self-indulgent nonsense.
But while this was happening, jazz was changing its place in the social order. Jazz musicians who had once been seen as dangerous and marginal were welcomed into the American musical canon. Today, jazz is favored by the sophisticated and by those who want to be seen as sophisticated. It has taken its place among opera and classical music as “important art.”
Rock has not yet made that transition. Today hip-hop has taken the place of cultural dominance held by jazz in the 1940s and 1950s and by rock from the 1960s through the 1990s. Rock is just one of many other musical genres. Young people are as likely to choose EDM or lo-fi—genres which focus more on creating atmosphere and mood than on traditional song structures.
Long-form video content may not be going the way of the dinosaur, but it is already changing in form. Three-hour movies may become serialized, with stories unfolding over shorter installments. Viewers will choose between binge-watching or viewing each episode as an individual event.
We once encountered fear within stories that gave it form and meaning. Today, we encounter it in fragments that resist both. The forms remain. What changes is how we understand them—and how we process experience itself.
After social media, what comes next?
The human mind is, contrary to conventional wisdom, fully capable of riveted attention far longer than the accepted 40 minutes, as long as the subject matter is engaging and interesting.