You open the app for five minutes. An hour disappears. This is not an accident of design. It is the design.
The most revealing finding about infinite scroll is not that it consumes time — it is that it consumes time while producing a systematic misperception of how much time has passed. This is not the same as being absorbed in something. Reading a novel, building something, having a conversation — these also consume time. But they leave the person with a felt sense of duration, a memory of what occurred, a relationship to the time that passed.
Infinite scroll produces the opposite: time passes without the sensation of passing. Users emerge from a session unable to accurately report how long they were present or what they encountered. The session is experienced not as duration but as a kind of suspended present — an extended now that does not accumulate into a past.
HCI researchers at MuC 2024 (Ruiz and colleagues) introduced a term that names the experience precisely: normative dissociation. The definition: a state characterized by simultaneously degraded self-awareness, reduced sense of time passage, and impaired ability to recall content encountered during the session. "Normative" because it is now statistically normal — the expected outcome of extended social media engagement, not a pathological exception to it.
The term is clinical in register, which obscures what it describes: a designed experience of not being present for your own life. The session happened. You were there. You have diminished access to what occurred and to how long it took.
ACM CHI 2025 research documented participant experiences of short-form video consumption. One participant (P1) described it directly: "I thought I had only watched a few Shorts, but an entire hour had flown by." This phenomenology — the gap between felt duration and elapsed time — was consistent across participants and is not anecdotal. It reflects the specific perceptual distortion produced by short video design: because each individual video is brief, the user does not register accumulation. No single video feels long. The hour does not feel like an hour because it was not experienced as an hour — it was experienced as a series of moments, none of which felt extended.
The absence of timeline indicators on short-form video platforms — no progress bar, no elapsed-time display, no marker of how long the session has been running — is not an oversight. Platform designers make deliberate choices about every interface element. The choice to omit time indicators is a choice made in the context of known research about user behavior: users who can see elapsed time are more likely to exit sessions. The omission increases session length. Session length is the metric the platform is optimizing for.
The infinite scroll removes pagination — the natural stopping point that divides content into discrete chunks and gives the user a decision node. The timeline removal removes temporal orientation. Together they produce a continuous, unmarked, undifferentiated present that is difficult to exit not because the content is compelling but because there is no natural boundary at which the question "should I stop?" organically arises.
Park and Jung's 2024 study of binge-scrolling dynamics found something initially counterintuitive: the infinite scroll feature that drives excessive consumption also generates feelings of regret and loss of self-control that ultimately reduce usage time for some users. The mechanism: once the normative dissociation breaks — when the user "comes back" and realizes how much time has passed — the resulting regret and self-criticism motivates session termination and sometimes avoidance. The platform's engagement-maximizing design occasionally undermines itself by producing the very awareness it was designed to suppress.
This paradox illuminates what temporal sovereignty actually requires in this context: not resistance to individual sessions, but the restoration of continuous temporal orientation — the capacity to remain aware of elapsed time during engagement, rather than requiring a jarring re-entry to awareness at session end.