Back in 2019, serene pre-pandemic times, it was said that no one of voting age could understand Tiktok. Even its creator, Zhang Yimin, then 36 years old—at 41 he would become the richest man in China—recognized that he did not know how to use it, that he was “very old,” as he told the South China Morning Post newspaper.
Five years later, TikTok is much more than teenage Comanche territory, it has changed everything in Internet culture and has become a digital artifact copied and hated in equal parts. The Supreme Court of the United States has endorsed its closure in that country starting this morning, alleging reasons of national security, and the company confirmed that it was shutting down this Sunday, leaving 170 million users mired in the darkest boredom and the cruelest of solitudes.
An x-ray of TikTok would be useful to explain its impact on digital life and on the ways and means of consuming and creating content on the Internet. Its followers—we could call them addicts in many cases—only needed 35 minutes of exposure to the algorithm to become captivated—we could also say hooked on its rapid dopaminergic kicks. We know this thanks to internal TikTok documents revealed by the NPR radio network. That level of engagement had never been seen on the Internet. Not even Marck Zuckerberg in his best days would have imagined it. So the first novelty of TikTok is its crazy and personalized algorithm to the point that some users feel that the platform reads their thoughts.
TikTok doesn’t need anything from you to create a highly refined profile of your tastes that will keep you glued to the screen. It doesn’t need to be defined like other social networks, it just needs you to breathe, be alive and open the application. The first time it will show you a single video on an infinite loop and begin to measure your reactions: a second of viewing indicates interest, a tap on the screen, desire. The algorithm draws the user’s profile, not based on their choices but on their behavior, reactions that are often unconscious and that allow the creation of an irresistible content feed. It is called For you (For you, in Spanish) and has behind it a sophisticated machine learning engine (machine learnig) that Byte Dance engineers describe as “complex sublinear computing”, but for tiktokers the experience could not be simpler and pleasurable: open the app, watch a video, relax and consume passively to infinity. They literally don’t have to do anything else. The addictive power of the algorithm is so accepted that it has become a content category with videos grouped under the hashtag #tiktokaddict that accumulates nearly 600 million views.
Suddenly, the rest of the Internet started to look old and boring. TikTok has accelerated digital times with a visual format of short videos that marks the modernity of the Internet as of 2020. Its overwhelming success has forced everyone to copy the format (Instagram launched Reels in August 2020 and YouTube, Shorts, a month after). Not doing so is the fastest way to age on the Internet. You don’t have to have a TikTok account to be conditioned by its visual and accelerated culture, since its content is replicated on other platforms in the same format. It is often said that consuming Instagram Reels is like watching TikTok two weeks late. The inexhaustible thirst for short videos has also altered the way we consume content in the traditional press and on television. Now programs and series are consumed in short clips, bursts of content. Rapid and consecutive shots of dopamine generated by the speed and the continuous promise of action and novelty that have shortened our attention cycles and also the length of the episodes of some Netflix series that now do not exceed 20 minutes. And that already seems very long to us.
By prioritizing novelty and discovery, TikTok’s powerful algorithm gives visibility to creators who have barely achieved status on the platform. That is to say, a creator can touch the Olympus of virality in 30 seconds, even if they have few followers. Something impossible to get on Instagram and YouTube. And, although it is also true that it is not the platform that pays the best, the generosity of the algorithm is engaging. On TikTok you don’t have to be famous, it’s TikTok that will make you famous. “TikTok’s algorithmic structure has leveled and democratized the playing field compared to a sanitized Instagram that only privileges the most prominent creators,” Jess Rauchberg, a professor at Seton Hill University in New Jersey and an economics expert, told the BBC. of digital creation.
Tiktok has made video the centerpiece of the Internet and unleashed the global creativity of established and new creators by designing sophisticated but easy-to-use editing tools and templates that anyone can replicate. The result is polished content, relatively simple in construction, that has expanded the horizons of creators who did not even consider themselves audiovisual artists. An infinite loop of engaging content without moving a finger (or just one, the one that scrolls across the screen)
On TikTok, we have already said, one has not come to make an effort. For some experts, one of its great merits is that it has eliminated a syndrome that had been weighing down the Internet, decision fatigue. In Tiktok, the app is opened and a loop of content is immediately available without making any decision. That break is very attractive. The short and witty videos appear before our eyes in an endless vertical flow, an infinite scroll that provokes a state very close to happiness. A study from Baylor University in Waco revealed that the TikTok experience produces “high levels of flow and time distortion,” a state typically observed when one is absorbed in a task that provides pleasure and well-being. When, from the outside, we see someone using TikTok, we observe that absorbed attitude, but it is precisely that self-absorption that reveals the effectiveness of the fortuitous reward system that is in TikTok’s DNA. With each scroll something better could come. Or not. We don’t know, but it is the uncertainty and the eternal promise of newness that won’t let us stop.
