Psychological exploration of audience’s addiction to watching mobile short videos during Covid-19-Taking Chinese audience as an example

In recent years, short videos have shown a spurt of development, and they have become the "third language" of the Internet in addition to graphics and voice. Short video software can be easily used without threshold, and at the same time, it can be accurately pushed according to the needs of the audience, quickly covering every age group in China. However, there are many hidden dangers behind the explosion of short video popularity; since people have nothing to do at home due to the epidemic, there is a long-time addiction to it; consequently, falling into the trap of "entertainment to death". Short videos can easily make people feel emotional resonance when they are depressed by the epidemic. People can get some emotional comfort or release when they swipe short videos, so the phenomenon of short video addiction is especially obvious during the epidemic. While there are more and more studies on short videos, there are not enough studies on short video addiction at the audience level. Therefore, based on media dependence theory, this paper takes network belongingness as a mediating variable to explore the influence of the audience"s motivation to watch short videos addictively on short video addiction. The audience was selected from Chinese viewers who watch Jitterbug or TikTok, and through the online questionnaire survey, the filtered questionnaires were quantitatively analyzed by using the SPSS software. The results showed that impulsivity, anxiety, and loneliness were significantly positively correlated with addiction to short videos, were significantly positively correlated with network belongingness, and were significantly positively correlated with short video addiction. The quantitative analysis of the screened questionnaires using SPSS showed that impulsivity, anxiety, and loneliness were significantly positively correlated with addiction to watching short videos, and were significantly positively correlated with the sense of belonging to the network.