TikTok Is the New Internet Famous
The classic Instagram influencer is a staple in almost everyones Instagram feed at this point. Most of them flaunt a flawless fake tan (Or real? Maybe they have enough time in their day to bask in the sun for hours. Must be nice.), have beautifully scuplted legs and cheekbones, and perfectly blended balayage. The impact of social media influencers such as these is starting to dwindle, however, thanks to the up and coming social media platform TikTok. Not to be confused with Ke$has hit song, TikTok is a new form of social media that is quite popular in the current generation of pre-teens and teens, not only in the USA, but all over the world.
The main purpose of TikTok is to allow people from anywhere in the world to do one thing: share videos of themselves singing, dancing, and doing 15 second comedy sketches. This may sound familiar to you. That is because it has basically been done before. One of the original apps with this format was Vine, which was around for about 6 years before closing its figurative doors in 2017. To be honest, I can still see the hundreds of “RIP Vine” tweets in my head as I type this. The tragic loss of Vine was remedied by the birth of a new video app, Musical.ly. Musical.ly, which was launched in August of 2014, was essentially the same concept as Vine, but with very small and ultimately unconcequential differences. After seeing how well recieved Musical.ly was by the world, the app was joined with TikTok by the company ByteDance. This marks the takeoff of TikTok into mainstream media.
While scrolling through your TikTok feed, you may run across a number of different “genres” of TikToks. The most popular of these is the well known comedy sketch or lip sync video, usually consisting of a choreographed dance or popular pop song. Users are able to like, coment, and share videos they enjoy, as well as following creators. It is also extremely easy to be viewed by millions of people. The ease of exposure on the app is one of the main attractions for viewers. While on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube it can take years and years to get even 5,000 followers, one single video on TikTok can easily get up to 100,000 views with very little effort. This is also a very easy way to accumulate internet “fame”. People have quickly figured out how to use TikToks easy exposure to their advantage by linking their other social media platforms on their TikTok account. For example, if you acquire up to a hundred million views on a video, a good majority of those people will be looking at your accout details and subsequently accessing your other social media. This was something that probably was not done on purpose by the creators of TikTok, but it is something that has greatly lifted the barrier on becoming “internet famous”.
Another perk of the TikTok app is the lack of presence that cyberbullying has. In comparison to other social media platforms, Instagram and Snapchat being the most prevalent ones in terms of cyberbullying, it is relatively hard to receive negative feedback or hate comments on TikTok. I believe this is partially due to the formatting of the app. If you see something you don’t like, it is a million times easier to simply swipe up and go to the next video than take the time to write something that could have a negative impact on the content creator. It is also much more work to see the comments section on the videos, whereas on Instagram, it can be really easy to get lost in the comments section of a post. It is a really smart and safe format for a social media platform, and while I don’t think that any form of social media could be categorized as “healthy”, this app is much tamer and safer than many other forms of social media that exist.
