The Bimodality of TikTok
If Instagram became ubiquitous because it was all about likes and being your best self (even if the images are entirely photoshopped or presented as slivers of real life while actually nothing could be further from the truth), Snapchat was the antidote (a picture of the carpet or your knee or a distorted face, quick message scrawled across, often in code). Well now there’s TikTok, a platform born in China in 2016 and massive in the U.S. since 2018 after the parent company acquired musical.ly. TikTok boasts one billion (with a B) monthly active users. It’s huge. And interestingly, it has found life as a kind of mash up of the perfection of Instagram and the I-don’t-care-ness of Snapchat, all with a throwback to the old Vine format of short form video.
This Vox piece provides a great assessment of the bimodality of TikTok, exploring the power of ugly in a world of perfection. In a nutshell: Normal kids have created an entire genre of internet comedy devoted to how constantly seeing exceptional talent and beauty go viral makes the rest of us feel like ugly losers. In other words, take a standard, flip it on its head, and run with it. That’s the microcosm of TikTok, where both the original standard and the new one coexist.
As parents, this is a curveball - in general and specific to the pretty/ugly stories evolving in real time. On the one hand, how wonderful for our kids to reject perfectionism. On the other hand, though, is the self-criticism more real than rebellious? Is this a case of many a true word being said in jest? The “Hi, I’m Ryan” video cited by Vox is a perfect example of how most kids navigate this fine line, all the while entertaining others.
In July, Ryan Sterling, a 23-year-old in the Chicago suburbs who has had alopecia since he was in middle school, uploaded a video that begins with a picture of Britney Spears with a shaved head followed by a picture of Mr. Clean, and then himself: “It all started when my mom met my dad, then they fell in love, and they had me. Hi, I’m Ryan,” he says. “And my life? It’s kinda crazy.”
It is funny. And poignant. And understandably viral. Maybe painful. Or self-embracing. Or self-demeaning. But back to also funny.
With a billion users posting every month across the globe, your kid is either putting up content on TikTok or at the very least consuming it from this platform. So just know about it, ask about it, and if you have that kind of relationship with your kid, watch a few of these together. Parenting is a gigantic grey zone where an experience for one child can be empowering while the same experience can decimate another. TikTok is kind of like that too, a giant social world with distinct poles that coexist… sort of.
There’s a TikTok that’s just a boy saying, “I may be ugly, but at least I’m also … dumb and annoying.” Then he dances while Ariana Grande’s “Successful” plays. It’s extremely funny, and a little bit sad, and I think about it every day.Kids on TikTok call themselves ugly all the time, most of the time as a joke, but not always, and I’m never sure how I’m supposed to feel about it. “Why do I look like this? What’s the reason?” asked the… READ MORE
