Today I have TikTok on my mind. All fall it was in the press, as a proxy in the economic battles between the President and China. But it was clear the media had a hard time getting its head around what exactly kids today saw in this short form video app. And one thread, the one that interested me, was the idea that adults just couldn’t “get it”. This month’s Atlantic, for example, has a major article arguing “no medium has ever… cleaved a generation from its elders so completely.”
That to me is like blood to a shark. I had to bite.
In the early 1990s, I received my Masters from NYU in American Culture. My thesis poked into the largely unexplored history of how in post-WW2 America the great medium cleaving elders from the new generation were labelled comic books (“America’s Most Wanted: Cultural Change, Severed Heads, and the Comic Book Reformation of 1948-56”). I was adapting, in part, the idea from James Gilbert’s 1986 “A Cycle of Outrage.” We see throughout history, time and again, when a new medium arrives and is adopted by youth culture, adults go through a cycle of outrage; we focus on the unwelcome corrupter of innocent youth but are driven by the cultural concerns of the day. Chess. Pulp novels. Rock music. Rap music. Mobile apps. The list is endless, but the conclusion is always the same: acceptance, adaptation, and then attaching our cultural anxieties on to the next disruptor.
TikTok is the latest disruptor (anyone here anxious about globalization?) so let me just offer what will become more clear when we get to the acceptance stage. That is, let me answer: What value does TikTok bring to the lives of today’s youth?
TikTok is many things but when I explore it what I see is the power of collective improvisation.
At first, it was invisible to me, as I didn’t know how to “read” what I was seeing when I first opened the app. Like back in 2002, when I first watched some children playing Super Smash Bros. on a Play Station. These three boys – 6, 8 and 10 – were all playing the same game, all equally engaged, but clearly playing in completely different ways. But my main take-away was that I could not follow the action.
I grew up on Atari’s and Intellivision, but skipped Nintendo and hadn’t seen a console in over a decade. I could not draw from any of my early experience. I had no clue what was going on. I couldn’t “read” what I was seeing. The camera perspective wasn’t fixed, like in the video games of my youth, from a god-like perspective. Instead, it jumped around, zooming in and out on the action. Sometimes characters were battling off screen, sometimes they were in the center. It was pure chaos. And I realized then if I didn’t learn how to follow this type of narrative – driven by video game mechanics – I WOULD experience a separation from the world those children would grow up and produce. This led me to develop Playing For Keeps, at Global Kids, back in 2002, and to nearly two decades of working with youth to develop pro-social games. Yes, it was for them. But it was also for me.
When I first saw TikTok I had the same experience. I had no idea what to do. When I first encountered Super Smash Bros. I tried to watch it like television. My mistake wasn’t seeing it for what it was, misdirected by expectations set from an old medium. Same with TikTok. When I first saw it I treated it like YouTube – as a stream of videos to watch by amateur participants. Granted, I HAD been involved with its predecessor – Music.ly – in which both I and my children posted short clips of us dancing, walking, moving to audio bits. But I saw right away TikTok was something else.
It felt like I had walked into a cocktail party. I could see people’s lips were moving but I couldn’t hear the conversation. Something was going on, but I was missing it. And I couldn’t figure out a way in.
Yes, I saw I could watch a video. And like most social media it had likes, and comments. But that, I soon learned, wasn’t the heart of the conversation. Each video features a spinning circle (which to me reads like a record, but I’m old). Clicking on that reveals both the key innovation in TikTok, and the entrance to the conversation.
The video I am watching is most likely not an original. Rather it’s a response and remix to someone else’s. This is a virtual call and response. That spinning circle is a link to the previous step in the conversation. And THAT page shows ALL of the other responses to it, with a Call To Action: “Use this sound.” That’s why my experience at first was like listening to one side of a telephone conversation. I had watched each video as if it was a discrete product. In fact, each video is just one line in a vast script that is playing in the viewer’s head. That’s why, on its own, I could not follow along. I didn’t know how to read that script.
I am sure an active TikToker would explain what I have wrong here, but I’m confident the big picture is on target. TikTok for many is about jumping down that rabbit hole, following the beats of that conversation backwards, and exploring the different directions it takes into the future. And then, for those inspired, deciding how ones wants to contribute. One can simply make one’s own video to the same audio clip – doing a certain dance move, showing a certain photo with each lyrics – but TikTok has grown more sophisticated in its offerings. You can split the video in half and collaborate WITH the original video, putting yourself next to the original. OR, you can take one of THOSE videos, and become the third collaborator. And so on.
A good example was highlighted by James Corden on The Late Late Show for Thanksgiving.
Or this piece a few days ago in the New York Times, whose title says it all: “On TikTok, Fans Are Making Their Own ‘Ratatouille’ Musical”.
Both show collaboration on TikTok as a linear act, a sort of exquisite corpse, each person passing their contribution on to the next person, one after another. But both TikTok and digital creativity is much messier than that. It’s more like a mosh pit, a free-for-all. I jump in, see what I like, find inspiration, add my contribution, toss it back in, and see what others do (or don’t do) with it.
The internet has always thrived on a type of playful, often irreverent, collective improvisation. Gifs as memes are a great example. There is great energy in such creativity, and places like Reddit and 4Chan thrive on it. But perhaps TikTok has taken the game to a whole new level, bringing both video and audio into the mix in a powerfully new networked way.
I am excited for the literacy of collective improvisation TikTok is developing among its fans, how it trains them to “read” connections between media constructions and trace their embedded creative dialogues, how it encourages them to find their own meaningful way to participate.
I am excited for what this generation will do with this literacy when they grow up. And I know, if I want to be ready for it, I better start practicing now.
