Tiktok: some love it, some hate it, and the latter are wildly misinformed about it. When I tell you that this app is the pinnacle of media content creation and consumption in history thus far, you’d do well to believe me. If you don’t want to believe me, however, you can take it from Jia Tolentino, one of the great writers of our time, and her piece about TikTok in The New Yorker. What Tolentino reveals is what makes TikTok… tick. TikTok is different from all the other apps that have come before is that it’s insanely good at predicting what you want. It only takes a day or two for it to learn what you like and start finding more for you.
Oh, TikTok. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
It’s fantastically brilliant. TikTok’s algorithm isn’t so much concerned about pushing you content as it is about feeding you content. Where Netflix and YouTube emphasize their most popular creators or shows, the ones that make them money and that they spend money on, TikTok just shows you what you tell it to. The more TikToks you like, the more it learns your niche. Part of the algorithm is location-based as well, so while it may show you someone with a few hundred-thousand followers in NewYork, it’s less likely to show that same creator to someone in Los Angeles or Chicago.
One of the great things about TikTok is that it’s built off of a generation that grew up with extensive knowledge of Vine, it’s predecessor. As a result, the social reproduction of Vines is one form of creating content on TikTok, like this one, an homage to a classic Vine of a mother freaking out at her daughter about her “Valentino white bag:”
It’s true, TikToks will never reach as iconic statuses as Vines as they are often too long to be memeable, but they are much more sustainable than Vine for precisely the same reason. There is only so much you can do with seven seconds, but one to two minutes? There’s a lot of space to work with, and brilliant young minds all over the world are putting it to work. Every day someone is using a new effect, sound, or format to create something totally unique.
The other side to the memable aspect, of course, is that on TikTok, sound is the medium through which memes are reproduced. Trends aren’t so much reproduced through words as they are through sounds people use or create in their own videos. A particular song or mashup will be used in the background of transformation videos or a popular dance, and then people put their own spin on it to make it funny. Someone makes a joke and then other people use the sound from that person telling the joke to make their own jokes too. TikTok lets you create culture visually, audibly, textually, or contextually, which provides fertile ground for memes abound.
But if I’m being super honest here, what I love most about TikTok isn’t TikTok itself. What I love are the spaces that Zoomers have created for themselves on the app, how they’ve taken this once-cringey monstrosity and made it into an infinite zone of creativity. The next big thing didn’t have to be TikTok… it could have been Vine 2.0 or something totally out of reach of my imagination. I have seen content created by my generation that transcends anything I’ve ever seen before, and I am grateful that TikTok exists to provide it to me.