I awake, the covers feeling heavy and warm against my body. I extend my arm towards my night table, touching the cool metal and glass until I feel the plastic coating of my phone. The screen reveals the time: three am. I slide up, revealing my organized grid of apps, each competing for the possibility to lull me back to sleep. Will I choose an episode of This American Life on the podcast app? An opinion piece in The New York Times? An Emma Chamberlain vlog on YouTube? The number of options surely requires deliberation, but my hand automatically gravitates towards one, in particular, one that is none of these, and yet all of these. I tap on TikTok.
Within five minutes of scrolling on the “For You” page, I’m startled by prisoners in orange jumpsuits dancing next to steel-framed beds. I smile as I watch Britani Lancaster’s cheery “What I Eat in a Day in Eating Disorder Recovery” video posted hours earlier. I laugh at a video of Roblox avatars in a Florida-like Roblox town driving to Starbucks in a pixelated Mercedes G Class SUV, one of Lana Del Rey’s early pop Americana songs playing. I blush at the personal questions asked to strangers on the streets of New York City in “What’s Poppin’ with Davis!,” a New School student’s show. I’m intrigued by a video of a psychiatric facility employee discussing security protocols.
By the end of these 30 to 60-second videos, as soon as a question or thought forms in my head, such as how prisoners get iPhones, the next video plays. The beauty is that I don’t have to linger on any one of my thoughts about these videos, and can revel in the emotion these videos elicit: the laughter, the euphoria, the curiosity, and concern. Three-thirty AM arrives and though I could feel guilty that I spent so much time scrolling, the fact that I was not cognizant of time is liberating. When I let the “For You” page surprise me with whatever video comes next, there is less pressure to get eight hours of sleep so that the 16 hour day ahead can be as fruitful as possible. The fact that there are no timestamps on the videos themselves to indicate when the content was published only helps to create this effect.
The “For You” page is not just a reflection of the content I want to see. According to a TikTok blog post, what is shown to me on TikTok is based on the videos I like or share, accounts that I follow, hashtags, sounds, and whether I watch certain videos from start to finish. When a friend sends me a TikTok, I watch it and like it or even just watch it from start to finish (which is proper texting etiquette when someone sends a video by the way), I might begin to see other videos that resemble that video on my own “For You” page. The “For You” page cultivates connection because it is a mixture of what I desire to see and what those in my social circle desire to see. Take the Roblox video for example—I’ve never downloaded the app or played the game. It’s only on my “For You” page because one of my friends sends me those types of videos. I laugh when I come across it, not just because it’s funny to see avatars arguing on the streets and navigating the town, but because it reminds me of the person who sent it.
The TikTok algorithm does attempt to diversify feeds by showing users different types of videos and ensuring two videos in a row made with the same sound or by the same creator aren’t shown. It makes sense that prisons and psychiatric facilities appear on my “For You” page. On other content-based video apps such as YouTube, I can encounter a surprising video, but I still have to make the choice as to whether to click on it. As an indecisive person, I value that TikTok makes decisions for me. Further, the surprise I feel when those off-putting videos appear on my “For You” page compensates for the lack of spontaneity in my life due to COVID.
Most importantly, those videos have shown me aspects of the world that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise, serving an educational purpose. I now know about the safety features of bathrooms in psychiatric facilities, and I have a baseline understanding of how boring life must be for those prisoners. This information may be fleeting and replaced by a funny impression video or a video about a cinematic moment that lives “rent-free” in somebody’s head, but it nonetheless still reveals something new to me.
Ranging from backlash about the Creator Fund to data security concerns, TikTok has been entrenched in controversy. Nevertheless, the surprises, diversity of content, and timelessness of the “For You” page have gotten me and perhaps TikTok’s 100 million US users through tedious days and sleepless nights. To go on the “For You” page is to go with the flow.