By Wendy Simms, Biology Department, Faculty of Science and Technology, Vancouver Island University

Last Monday night, while we were waiting for our ecology class to assemble at Departure Bay beach for a lab, I overheard the students talking about vines.

“I LOVE vines. They are SO addictive. I can procrastinate by watching (like) ONE HUNDRED vines instead of just a few youtube videos.”

I had no idea what a vine was so I logged it in my brain to google “best of vines” when I got home.

After digging and measuring clams for a couple of hours we packed up and went home.

Just before I went to bed I remembered about the vines and jumped online to check it out. Really, vines were just a bunch of random super short videos. Some hilarious, some stupid, most pretty mindless. But 15mins later I was still watching them.

Maybe it was the expectation that another funny one would come on, or, that there would eventually be (like) more to it. Nope. That was it. If anything, I had just gotten stupider in the last 15minutes. I went to bed realizing I wasn’t missing out on much.

But I have since found myself thinking a LOT about vines and what they represent. Shorter is better.

In a world where social media dominates, the longer the post/message/tweet/video, the less chance it has of being picked up.

But IS shorter really better?

Growing research indicates that social media is actually rewiring our brains. The result: a shorter attention span. How can that be good?

As an academic institute what are we supposed to do? Do we keep it short to keep the attention or should we try to preserve some wiring in our student’s brains that can actually focus for longer than the 140 character Twitter limit?

I am not entirely sure what the answer is….