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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: DMS - Digital Media and Society
- Sprache: Englisch
Since its acquisition and rebranding in 2018, TikTok has become one of the fastest growing platforms in the world. Moreover, it's the first Chinese-developed platform to find mainstream international success, carving its own niche in the global short video industry.
In the first comprehensive exploration of TikTok, Kaye, Zeng, and Wikström provide a history of the emergent genre of short video and situate the platform within the cultures and controversies that have accompanied its dramatic growth. They provide an extensive overview of TikTok's functions and uses, the diverse markets in which the platform operates, and the issues of governance that have impacted its expansion. Once thought to be 'just for kids', the authors illustrate how TikTok is further transforming platform cultures and the dynamics of broader creative industries. TikTok, the authors argue, represents an evolutionary step in the way culture is produced and consumed on digital platforms.
This timely book is essential reading for students and scholars in media and communication studies and for anyone who has been captivated by the global growth of TikTok and short video.
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Seitenzahl: 369
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Table of Contents
Cover
Series Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Figures
Tables
Introduction: Creativity and Culture in Short Video
TikTok as a ‘platform’
The short video turn
TikTok and the pandemic
TikTok scholarship
Perspectives on creativity
Outline of this book
Notes
1 A Brief History of the Short Video Industry
The short-video format
Short-video platforms
The short-video format in the Chinese media market
How the four short-video platform features were introduced by Kuaishou and Meipai
Silicon Valley-based short video platforms
Templates: Vine
Stories: Snapchat
Music: Flipagram
Community: Musical.ly
ByteDance
The algorithm above all else
ByteDance enters the short-video market
Conclusion
Notes
2 The TikTok Platform Infrastructure
Inherently mobile and music-centric
The For You algorithm
Everyday interactions with the For You algorithm
Algorithmic folklore
Socially creative features
Duet
Stitch
Video Reply to Comments
Use This Sound
In-app video creation and editing features
Effects and filters
Live streaming
Social media platform features
@ Mentioning
Hashtags
Likes, comments, shares
Accessibility features
Emergent platform practices
Lip-syncing
Challenges
Calls for participation
Attribution
Appropriation
Conclusion
Notes
3 TikTok Communities
Building community through short video
TikTok
Gesellschaft
-type communities
Nomads and natives
TikTok-famous
Hype houses
TikTok
Gemeinschaft
-type communities
JazzTok
Discovery
Participation
Conclusion
Notes
4 TikTok Activism
#forClimate: Green memes on TikTok
Lip-sync activism
Generational mannerism
#saveTikTok
Ban the Official Trump 2020 App
TikTokers in support of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign
Generational social media
Intergenerational discord
Circumscribed creativity
Youth vernacular
Platform affordance and limitations
Conclusion
Notes
5 The TikTok Economy
TikTokers for sale
#TikTokMadeMeBuyIt
Daihuo
TikTok’s
daihuo
future
Creator business models
Gifts, coins, and diamonds
Influencer sponsorships
The TikTok Creator Fund
TikTok for Black Creatives
TikTok and the music industry
Monetizing musical memes
Success stories
Antagonizing the memetic processes
Conclusion
Notes
6 TikTok Governance
Platform governance struggle
The young demographic of the TikTok community
The short-video format as a conduit for illicit content
The China connection
A fragmented TikTok
Copyright governance
Visibility governance
Cultivating ‘positive content’
Conclusion
Notes
7 The Future of TikTok
The future of parallel platformization
The future of short-video creativity
The future of TikTok communities
The future of the professional TikTok creator
The future of TikTok and music
Final words
Notes
Appendix: Interviews
The interviewees
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Figure 0.1.
A ‘Stitch’ of @khaby.lame demonstrating how to peel a banan...
Figure 0.2.
TikTok’s worldwide download and Google’s Search Interest Index, s....
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1.
TikTok main viewing interface.
Figure 1.2.
TikTok video creation interface.
Figure 1.3.
Use This Sound interface.
Figure 1.4.
Timeline of the short video industry. Created by the authors.
Figure 1.5a and 1.5b.
Vine’s main viewing page and sharing feature.
Figure 1.6a and 1.6b.
Snapchat video creation interface and Stories feature.
Figure 1.7a and 1.7b.
Flipagram’s main viewing interface and Discover Music feature.
Figure 1.8a and 1.8b.
Musical.ly’s main viewing interface and Search feature.
Figure 1.9a–c.
Musical.ly’s Duet feature.
Figure 1.10a and 1.10b.
Douyin’s main viewing interface and Discover page.
Figure 1.11a and 1.11b.
Instagram Reels: its main viewing interface and video creation features.
Figure 1.12a and 1.12b.
YouTube Shorts’ main viewing interface and positioning on the main YouTub...
Figure 1.13a and 1.13b.
Byte’s main viewing interface and video creation feature.
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1a and 2.1b.
The basic Duet feature (left) and a Duet chain (right).
Figure 2.2a and 2.2b.
Video Reply to Comments.
Figure 2.3.
Labelled TikTok main video viewing window.
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1a–c.
Illustrated consecutive snapshots from a video titled ‘The Earth Is Crying...
Figure 4.2.
#VSCO girl aesthetics (https://www.tiktok.com/@luanndiez/video/6728834426...
Figure 4.3.
Examples of reviews posted to the Official Trump 2020 mobile app. Usernames and ...
Figure 4.4.
TikTok video depicting Joe Biden as the ‘TikTok President’ (https:...
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1.
Global recorded music industry revenues, 2001–2020 (US$ billions)....
List of Tables
Chapter 3
Table 3.1.
Top 50 TikTokers by follower count, October 2021. Created by the authors. Based ...
Chapter 5
Table 5.1.
ByteDance’s gradual e-commerce development on Douyin. Created by the auth...
Chapter 6
Table 6.1.
Nine types of content that are not allowed on TikTok. ‘Share’ is t...
Table 6.2.
The top five countries where the largest number of TikTok videos have been taken...
Table 6.3.
Takedown notices issued by TikTok. Created by the authors. Source: TikTok 2020 H...
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
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Series Title
Digital Media and Society Series
Nancy Baym,
Personal Connections in the Digital Age
, 2nd edition
Taina Bucher,
Mercedes Bunz and Graham Meikle,
The Internet of Things
Jean Burgess and Joshua Green,
YouTube
, 2nd edition
Mark Deuze,
Media Work
Andrew Dubber,
Radio in the Digital Age
Quinn DuPont,
Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains
Charles Ess,
Digital Media Ethics
, 3rd edition
Terry Flew,
Regulating Platforms
Jordan Frith,
Smartphones as Locative Media
Gerard Goggin,
Apps: From Mobile Phones to Digital Lives
Alexander Halavais,
Search Engine Society
, 2nd edition
Martin Hand,
Ubiquitous Photography
Robert Hassan,
The Information Society
Kylie Jarrett,
Digital Labor
Tim Jordan,
Hacking
D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye, Jing Zeng and Patrik Wikström,
TikTok: Creativity and Culture in Short Video
Graeme Kirkpatrick,
Computer Games and the Social Imaginary
Tama Leaver, Tim Highfield and Crystal Abidin,
Leah A. Lievrouw,
Alternative and Activist New Media
Rich Ling and Jonathan Donner,
Mobile Communication
Donald Matheson and Stuart Allan,
Digital War Reporting
Nick Monaco and Samuel Woolley,
Bots
Dhiraj Murthy,
, 2nd edition
Zizi A. Papacharissi,
A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age
Julian Thomas, Rowan Wilken and Ellie Rennie,
Wi-Fi
Katrin Tiidenberg, Natalie Ann Hendry and Crystal Abidin,
tumblr
Jill Walker Rettberg,
Blogging
, 2nd edition
Patrik Wikström,
The Music Industry
, 3rd edition
TikTok
Creativity and Culture in Short Video
d. bondy valdovinos kaye
jing zeng
patrik wikström
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye, Jing Zeng and Patrik Wikström 2022
The right of D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye, Jing Zeng and Patrik Wikström to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2022 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
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Suite 300
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4892-7
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4893-4(pb)
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2021950725
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
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Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
This book is the product of an unexpected collaboration that has given the three of us an opportunity to work closely together, share ideas, and grow as scholars. There are several individuals without whom this project would not have been possible, above all the many informants who gave us the precious gift of their time and insights. Thank you to the members of JazzTok and their friends who generously and enthusiastically took part in distance interviews via Zoom in early 2021.
We value our many incredible colleagues at LabEx Industries Culturelles & Création Artistique at the Sorbonne University, Paris Nord, at the Institut für Kommunikationswissenschaft und Medienforschung at the University of Zurich, and at the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology and greatly appreciate their insightful critiques, stimulating conversations, and enduring friendship. We thank the TikTok Cultures Research Network for creating a space for us to develop ideas and to learn from the continuously emerging voices.
We are deeply grateful to Mary Savigar and Stephanie Homer at Polity for their guidance, encouragement, and kindness throughout this process. Thanks also to our two anonymous reviewers for providing instructive feedback that has strengthened this book. Special thanks to River Juno for the beautiful illustrations featured throughout this book.
Finally, thank you to our family members and close friends for giving us their love and support, offering thoughts and suggestions for this book, and putting up for so many months with our incessant talk about the latest TikTok trends.
Figures
0.1. A ‘Stitch’ of @khaby.lame demonstrating how to peel a banana in a video shared in April 2021. Art provided by River Juno.
0.2. TikTok’s worldwide download and Google’s Search Interest Index, s.v. ‘TikTok’. Figure created by Jing Zeng, Crystal Abidin, and Mike Schäfer.
1.1. TikTok main viewing interface. Art provided by River Juno.
1.2. TikTok video creation interface. Art provided by River Juno.
1.3. Use This Sound interface. Art provided by River Juno.
1.4. Timeline of the short video industry. Created by the authors.
1.5a and 1.5b. Vine’s main viewing page and sharing feature. Art provided by River Juno.
1.6a and 1.6b. Snapchat video creation interface and Stories feature. Art provided by River Juno.
1.7a and 1.7b. Flipagram’s main viewing interface and Discover Music feature. Art provided by River Juno.
1.8a and 1.8b. Musical.ly’s main viewing interface and Search feature. Art provided by River Juno.
1.9a–c. Musical.ly’s Duet feature. Art provided by River Juno.
1.10a and 1.10b. Douyin’s main viewing interface and Discover page. Art provided by River Juno.
1.11a and 1.11b. Instagram Reels: its main viewing interface and video creation features. Art provided by River Juno.
1.12a and 1.12b. YouTube Shorts’ main viewing interface and positioning on the main YouTube mobile platform. Art provided by River Juno.
1.13a and 1.13b. Byte’s main viewing interface and video creation feature. Art provided by River Juno.
2.1a and 2.1b. The basic Duet feature (left) and a Duet chain (right). Art provided by River Juno.
2.2a and 2.2b. Video Reply to Comments. Art provided by River Juno.
2.3. Labelled TikTok main video viewing window. Art provided by River Juno.
4.1a–c. Illustrated consecutive snapshots from a video titled ‘The Earth Is Crying’ by @beiya02, lip-syncing to ‘Dear 2045’. Art provided by River Juno.
4.2. #VSCO girl aesthetics. Art provided by River Juno.
4.3. Examples of reviews posted to the Official Trump 2020 mobile app. Usernames and profile pictures have been removed.
4.4. TikTok video depicting Joe Biden as the ‘TikTok President’. Art provided by River Juno.
5.1. Global recorded music industry revenues 2001–2020 (US$ billions). Created by the authors. Source: IFPI 2021.
Tables
3.1. Top 50 TikTokers by follower count, October 2021. Created by the authors.
5.1. ByteDance’s gradual e-commerce development on Douyin. Created by the authors.
6.1. Nine types of content that are not allowed on TikTok. Created by the authors.
6.2. The top five countries where the largest number of TikTok videos have been taken down. Created by the authors.
6.3. Takedown notices issued by TikTok. Created by the authors.
IntroductionCreativity and Culture in Short Video
On 13 April 2021, a video1 was uploaded to the short video platform TikTok in which a pair of hands are shown holding a butcher’s knife, a banana, and a cutting board. The video is polished and of professional quality, presenting the aesthetic of a do-it-yourself (DIY) life hack video. The disembodied hands begin to use the massive knife to peel a banana, cutting out large chunks of the fruit with each blade stroke. The song playing in the background is ‘Chug Jug with You’,2 recorded in late 2018 by YouTuber Leviathan.
After about 15 seconds, just as the disembodied chef presents the boxy, mangled, albeit peeled banana,3 the video abruptly cuts to a young man in a sparse room sitting motionless and expressionless in front of a banana on his desk. Wordlessly, he picks up the banana and peels it with his hands. Without changing his expression, he presents the peeled banana to the camera, gestures to it with his hand (see Figure 0.1), and leans forward to end the recording while shaking his head in disbelief, as if to say, ‘are you serious?’ The second part of the video appears to be completely unedited and has no music at all. The only sounds that can be heard are the peeling of the banana and the faint voices and noises from the room where the young man is sitting.
Figure 0.1. A ‘Stitch’ of @khaby.lame demonstrating how to peel a banana in a video shared in April 2021.
The video was created by @Khaby.Lame (Khabane Lame), a Senegalese Italian man, who was 21 at the time. Khaby began posting videos in mid-2020 after losing his job in a factory in Chivasso, a commune in Turin, during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. His early TikTok videos were either silent or in Italian, aimed at local audiences, but upon discovering that his life hack reaction videos could go viral he stopped posting in Italian and kept going with the recipe that seemed to work (Horowitz & Lorenz, 2021).
Life hack videos, where creators demonstrate novel or creative solutions to minor everyday problems, and their parody counterparts, where creators perform a simple task in a ridiculous and impractical manner, portrayed as a life hack, translate well into the short format of TikTok. Unlike videos shared on platforms such as YouTube or Facebook, TikTok videos generally do not include a title that might differentiate between the serious and the silly. Users also encounter videos by scrolling through an endlessly refreshed feed, as opposed to selecting videos to watch from a homepage or menu. Therefore, when users scroll through a new 30-second life hack video, it can be difficult to spot from the start whether it is serious or a parody.
The video is using a TikTok feature called Stitch, which allows users to clip a section of the video they were just watching and to stitch their own content at the end of it, so as to create a new video. Khaby is skilfully using the Stitch feature to create an ironic juxtaposition between the first and the second video – a comedic device frequently used in short-format videos. As the video begins, the viewer is watching what appears to be an earnest life hack for bananas. Moments pass and the viewer starts to wonder: ‘Wait… Why are they performing surgery on a banana? Why don’t they just peel it?’ Right at the point where viewers realize they are being trolled and are about to scroll away, the video cuts to Khaby. As a surrogate for the viewer, Khaby is silent, raw, and dominated by his facial expressions, which speak volumes as to what he thinks about the life hack video. Khaby reflects on his talent and technique simply by noting that ‘it’s [his] face and [...] expressions which make people laugh’ (Horowitz & Lorenz, 2021).
During the three months immediately after being uploaded, Khaby’s 30-second banana-peeling video attracted 255 million views and 36 million likes. Khaby continued posting videos by following this successful recipe and, combined, his videos have attracted billions of views and likes and have expanded Khaby’s fanbase from basically zero to 70 million in only three months. As of mid-2021, his account is the third most followed account on TikTok, and his globally diverse following outnumbers the population of Italy, millions of users viewing, engaging, and creating their own videos on the basis of his content.
Khaby’s simple banana-peeling video is a powerful example of how the short-video format is used to weave a complex tapestry of internet practices and memes and how it encapsulates many of the practices, phenomena, and challenges of creativity and culture that we are exploring in this volume. We will return to Khaby’s career in later chapters; but before that we introduce our excursion in the next section by conceptualizing TikTok as a platform. This section discusses what we consider to be a short video trend in digital media culture. We then acknowledge the transformational impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on digital media and the rapid growth of TikTok’s user base. Before finishing the chapter by outlining the structure of the book, we discuss the emergent field of TikTok scholarship and four perspectives we employ in our study of creativity and culture in short video.
TikTok as a ‘platform’
TikTok can be explored as a product launched and operated by the Chinese company ByteDance, and it can be analysed as a business that generates most of its revenues from advertising. TikTok can also be understood as an app employed by its users to create and share short videos, or as a tool used for entertainment, marketing, or education. In this book, however, we conceptualize and discuss TikTok as a platform.
Platforms are, in a generic sense, online software infrastructure in the form of apps or web interfaces that allow users to share, interact, and develop new forms of use and utility. But the concept of platform also has a rhetorical function. Given the ontological nature of what this concept stands for, the fact that a platform lets actors stand upon it and ‘gives leverage, durability, and visibility’ (Schwarz, 2017, p. 377), the term ‘platform’ has been employed by digital companies to promote certain discourses.
As Gillespie (2010) points out, companies strategically refer to their technologies as ‘platforms’, as a way ‘not only to sell, convince, persuade, protect, triumph or condemn, but to make claims about what these technologies are and are not’ (p. 359). For example, by describing itself as a ‘platform for creative self-expression’, a ‘global entertainment platform’ (TikTok, 2020a, 2020f), TikTok sells the image of a space for joy and creativity to its users and advertisers and at the same time distances itself from the serious allegations it has been facing in some of the markets where it operates (more discussion on TikTok controversies in chapter 6).
To think of TikTok as a platform also requires us to investigate how its technological features, functions, and logic interplay with, and respond to, different social and cultural practices. This process of mutual shaping between digital platforms and entities that deploy the infrastructure can be described as platformization (Helmond, 2015; Van Dijck, Poell, & de Waal, 2018).
As oligopolies are dominated by big technology companies such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon, our sociopolitical life and cultural activities are becoming increasingly dependent on a small number of dominant platforms. In such a ‘platform-centred situation’, as Jean Burgess (2021, p. 21) described it, platformization serves as a useful theoretical construct to problematize the power of technology companies. An overarching objective of this book is to discuss the implication and problems of TikTok’s platformization of creative culture, social activities, and information governance.
One factor that makes TikTok a particularly interesting case for the study of platformization is its unique location in the global platform system. TikTok is not born out of Silicon Valley, as most other international digital media platforms. TikTok has its heritage from China, and the mature short-video industry in the Chinese market has benefited the platform’s development overseas. At home, TikTok’s mother company ByteDance operates a ‘sibling’ short-video platform called Douyin, which shares most of its features and functions with TikTok. Douyin’s triumphs and struggles at home, as we will discuss throughout this book, have been crucial to the success of TikTok’s global development. However, as a response to international suspicion about its Chinese roots, TikTok works hard to distance itself from its Chinese mother company and sibling platform.
In the fast-growing scholarship on platform studies, platformization and platform systems in China have often been discussed as atypical and different from the western norm, due to that country’s particular technological and governing conditions.4 For instance, Wang and Lobato (2019) showed that platformization processes in China are distinct from similar processes in other markets and that the difference involves both macro-level factors such as market regulation and micro-level factors such as platforms’ affordances. They argued that these distinctive characteristics call for a ‘spatialized platform theory that is sensitive to the historical origins of particular platforms’ and for the need to ‘de-Westernize’ platform studies (p. 367).
The conditions that govern platformization processes in the Chinese markets are indeed embedded in the development trajectory of most technology companies in China. This means that ByteDance’s two sibling platforms, Douyin and TikTok, offer a unique opportunity for us to study how almost identical platforms operate in very different markets and regulatory environments while they mirror and influence each other. This process has been conceptualized by Kaye, Chen, and Zeng (2021) as parallel platformization. This concept expands on the logic of platform localization or regionalization – processes in which developers adapt platforms to new markets (IndiaSA Comms Team, 2019; Perez, 2019) – by considering how firms iterate platform infrastructures and adapt (or not) to different modes of governance.
We are using this concept in our interrogation of the TikTok’s platform specifics. However, it is necessary to note that our parallel approach does not promote the binary dichotomization of China versus ‘the West’ (de Kloet et al., 2019), or a sensationalist notion that Chinese digital markets are vast and unique (Herold & de Seta, 2015). Rather, through engaging examples from Douyin and the Chinese short-video industry throughout this book, we aim to illuminate the intersections, interdependence, and conflict between the two platform ecologies.
The short video turn
TikTok is not the world’s first short-video platform. In Europe, in the United States, and across Asia, there have been several popular short-video platforms before TikTok such as Vine, Dubsmash, and Kuaishou (see the review of short-video platforms in chapter 1). However, TikTok is the first short-video platform that succeeded in growing into an international mainstream operation and whose influence has been able to rival that of major Silicon Valley technology companies such as Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. As a response to the new competition from TikTok, these Silicon Valley platforms have launched their own short-video services, including Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts.
We argue that the fast growth of TikTok and other similar short-video services heralds the rise of a short-video turn. This phenomenon should be seen as the continuation of the ‘visual turn’ in social media (Gibbs et al., 2015) that was signified by the proliferation of visually rich platforms (e.g. Instagram) and communication (e.g. selfies, GIF, vlogs). The short-video format has been employed to communicate funny memes, social campaigns, educational tutorials, and investigative news. But, unlike their longer-format cousins such as YouTube videos, bite-size videos on TikTok are characterized by a higher degree of sociality, immediacy, and playfulness.
The availability of fast internet (e.g. 5G) and smartphones has facilitated the prevalence of audiovisuality-dominated mobile communication. However, besides the technological advance, an arguably more important factor that contributes to the short-video turn is the rise of a youthful and creative generation, generation Z (Gen Z).5 The rise of TikTok coincides with the maturing of Gen Z as members of the society with a desire to create, connect, and make themselves heard. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are often perceived by Gen Z as ‘uncool’ and full of ‘nosy’ family members, while emerging short-video platforms that cater for youth (e.g. Muscial.ly and Dubsmash) already became an important social space for many members of the Gen Z cohort.
On these platforms, the video challenges evolved into the new meme, dances and lip-sync performance became the new selfie, and body gestures serve as the new emojis (Rettberg, 2017). By incorporating modalities of videos, teens and pre-teens cultivate their own vernacular and create their visual grammar. The youth creative culture continues to influence the platform, even with an increasingly diversified user base on these platforms.
TikTok and the pandemic
Since its launch in 2018, TikTok has become one of the fastest growing digital media platforms in the world. As of mid-2020, TikTok reported almost 700 million monthly active users outside China and 600 million daily active users of the sibling platform Douyin in the Chinese market (Iqbal, 2021). Even though TikTok has been banned from some of its largest markets (e.g. India), the number of users has likely continued to grow after this data was reported.
As shown in Figure 0.2, the worldwide downloads of TikTok reached their peak during the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak, partially as a result of extensive lockdowns around the world. As Wells, Li, and Lin (2020) put it, ‘TikTok has been one of the world’s biggest distractions during the pandemic’. With orders for school closures and home offices rolled out in different parts of the world, the short-video platform came to be used by many to pass the time, socialize, or learn new skills. To a large extent, the pandemic could be instrumentally considered the tipping point of the TikTok platform, in terms of both its user base and the public discussions about it.
Figure 0.2. TikTok’s worldwide download and Google’s Search Interest Index, s.v. ‘TikTok’. Figure created by Jing Zeng, Crystal Abidin, and Mike Schäfer.
First, before the COVID-19 outbreak, the dominance of Gen Z TikTokers was very prominent. As pointed out by Milovan Savic (2021), TikTok’s predecessor Musical.ly was intentionally designed to appeal to the teenage and pre-teen markets and at the same time rhetorically positioned to circumvent moral panic around kids’ usage of technology. Since the start of the pandemic in 2020, users from much more diverse age groups have joined the platform. For instance, TikTokers have seen the emergence of #over30, #over40, and #over50 clubs on the platform where older creators were able to socialize and share relatable stories and jokes with their peers on topics such as parenting, married life, or their struggles to execute TikTok dance routines. At the same time, older family members who were once simply the target of Gen Z’s TikTok pranks have become active and engaging creators themselves, as several videos with hashtags such as #DadsOfTikTok and #MomsOfTikTok went viral.
Second, the public sentiment towards TikTok shifted significantly around 2020. On the one hand, the platform’s Chinese roots raised concern over issues such as data safety and censorship (Kuo, 2019; M. Singh, 2020). Discussion about TikTok has been heavily politicized on account of the Sino-US trade war and the 2020 presidential election in the United States. In response to allegations, the platform’s international operations self-imposed a ‘whitewashing’ strategy designed to distance the platform from China. On the other hand, as TikTok’s popularity and media coverage continued to grow, the general public’s indifference turned into curiosity and eventually scrutiny, and the platform has increasingly been surrounded by criticism. One of the main controversies has been around TikTok’s perceived lack of protection for children. As mentioned earlier, as Musical.ly evolved into TikTok, it passed on its popularity among youngsters as a legacy; but the existence of a young user base has gradually turned from a blessing into a curse. The platform’s failure in handling children’s data has led to lawsuits filed in Europe and the United States. Additionally, concerns over illicit content, including pornography and violence, are also rising, and have even resulted in the platform’s permanent shutdown in some markets, for example Pakistan.
In response, as we will discuss at some length in chapters 4 and 6, TikTok launched a wide variety of campaigns to improve its image. For instance, after the COVID-19 outbreak, TikTok organized a high-profile collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO), in order to offer health information to the youth. This initiative was followed by public health workers as well as by school teachers, who turned the platform into a learning channel during COVID-19 lockdowns. The agenda item of selling TikTok’s educational potential existed before the pandemic, but was catalysed by the health crisis.
If TikTok’s popularity grows, public attention to its impact, and especially to potential threats, will grow as well. This mainstreaming drives the need for scholarly attention to be dedicated to the platform. TikTok research is still in its infancy, and in the next section we provide a brief overview of this emerging field.
TikTok scholarship
The rapid rise of TikTok and media interest in this phenomenon have attracted the attention of a wide range of scholars around the world. In April 2021, 122 publications related to TikTok have been recorded in the Scopus database.6 As Zeng, Abidin, and Schäfer’s (2021) review of these publications indicates, studies of TikTok started to appear in academic journals in 2019 and took off during the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw a surge of research interest in the platform’s potential to disseminate health information. Researchers from the fields of computer science and social science took the lead in researching TikTok; their focus was on the technological architecture, user behaviours, and content characteristics. In mid-2021, a range of studies have been devoted to conducting in-depth investigations into the platform’s sociopolitical and cultural profile.
In the early stages of this scholarship, TikTok was discussed as a ‘bite-size YouTube’, and TikTok videos were considered to be ‘another form of vlog’. As more cultural and media studies scholars began to contribute to this reasearch, the focus shifted and TikTok – together with the short-video format – was recognized as a separate category, distinct from its long-form ancestors. The most relevant studies from this emerging body of scholarship will be discussed throughout the present book.
As TikTok gradually becomes an established part of mainstream media culture, we are expecting to see the scholarship on TikTok, as well as on short videos in general, rapidly grow and diversify. The platform’s features, user dynamics, and regulations are changing fast; this opens new opportunities for academic research, but also brings challenges to it. By the time you are reading this book, TikTok may have already evolved and changed, or even may no longer exist. However, in terms of media political economy, the story of the bumpy rise (or rise and fall) of Chinese social media in the global market is itself significant. By focusing on the early years of TikTok, this book documents the challenges that the platform faces to fit into the international contexts. Moreover, our discussion of the mutual shaping between short videos and the creative culture of a new ‘media generation’ (Bolin, 2017) is relevant to many other platforms. In the next section we elaborate on four theoretical approaches to creativity that we use in our analysis.
Perspectives on creativity
In our examination of creativity and culture in short video, we focus on four ways to conceptualize creative practices: vernacular, social, distributed, and circumscribed creativity. These four perspectives are introduced in what follows.
Vernacular creativity. We use Burgess’ (2006) concept of ‘vernacular creativity’ to describe TikTokers’ affective and platform-specific communicative styles. In her original work, Burgess used this term to conceptualize creative communicative practices in digital storytelling that emerge from an everyday and mundane context. As we will argue throughout this book, short videos are a form of digital storytelling, and the vernacular creativity embedded in the platforms is closely intertwined with digital youth culture and platform affordance. Furthermore, drawing on Burgess and Green’s (2018) foundational work on YouTube, we will explore areas of tension between open vernacular creativity and commercial interests on TikTok.
Social creativity. Our approach to creativity in the context of TikTok’s platform infrastructures is inspired by Glăveanu’s (2020) work, which emphasizes a sociocultural theory of perspectives and affordances. Glăveanu’s ‘perspective-affordance’ theory of creativity foregrounds the ‘social, material, and cultural ecology of positions, perspectives, actions, and affordances that make up creative processes above and beyond isolated people and products’ (p. 350). This approach advocates study of the processes that mutually shape creativity between social, material, and cultural assemblages. In this regard, the approach complements theories of platformization that identify similar mutually shaping sociotechnical processes between people, platforms, and corporations (van Dijck et al., 2018). We refer to Glăveanu’s approach simply as ‘social creativity’ in this book. We apply social creativity to our discussion of four specific platform features on TikTok that we argue are designed to facilitate creative interactions on the platform.
Distributed creativity. In discussing TikTok communities’ participatory production of creative work, we employ the concept of ‘distributed creativity’. The term was coined by Sawyer and DeZutter (2009) distributed and refers to activity among groups of individuals that results in a product that no one person is responsible for creating. Distributed creativity can be unrestrained and unpredictable, as in spontaneous improvisational performances by thespians or musicians. Using the example of a group of jazz musicians, we examine how distributed creativity contributes to building tight-knit communities on TikTok through the practice of virtually simulating musical jamming.
Circumscribed creativity. Finally, through the case study of how social activism takes place on TikTok, we introduce Kaye, Chen, and Zeng’s (2021) concept of ‘circumscribed creativity’ to describe how the creative potential of TikTok is both stimulated and constrained by short-video features and platform policies. Circumscribed creativity is theoretically grounded in circumscribed agency, a concept that refers to the autonomy afforded to individuals in normally rigid organizations to facilitate creative cultural production (Lotz, 2014; Havens, 2014). We expand this concept by connecting it to research on templatability (Leaver, Highfield, & Abidin, 2019) and imitation publics (Zulli & Zulli, 2020) on social media. In the context of TikTok, circumscribed creativity underlines how the platform introduces features and functions designed to encourage creation and re-creation of memetic content and at the same time actively sets boundaries on its users’ creativity through regulatory and algorithmic mechanisms. Before moving on, we want to acknowledge that this book is focused on the creativity and culture of users who visibly participate on TikTok by creating their own videos, by using socially creative features such as Stitch, and by posting public comments. The practices of non-creating users (see e.g. Preece, Nonnecke, & Andrews, 2004; Velasquez et al., 2014; Light, 2014; Sakariassen & Meijer, 2021) are indeed an essential part of a platform’s community, and in chapter 2 we recognize that non-creating users participate actively in shaping their own algorithmic feed and the recommendations shown to others, despite having never posted a video or a comment on TikTok. However, the formal interrogation of non-creating users’ practices on TikTok is beyond the scope of this book and remains a productive avenue for future research.
Outline of this book
In this book we advance an argument about the creativity and culture of short video; and we do this through an in-depth case study of TikTok.
Chapter 1 presents an evolutionary history of short video. There we contextualize the short-video format and distinguish four defining features of short-video platforms: length of content, endless scroll, native video production, and replicability. We demonstrate how the development of short-video platforms in China progressed relatively smoothly, by comparison with the chaotic and interrupted development of short-video platforms from Silicon Valley. We review four short-video platforms that preceded TikTok and that each added and solidified certain features and affordances that would come to define the platform genre. We conclude with an extensive account of TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, charting its rise from a bedroom start-up to an international media titan.
In chapter 2 we begin our analysis of platformization at the platform infrastructure level, looking at affordances and features. We begin by considering the platform affordances that make TikTok an inherently mobile and music-centric platform. We divide TikTok’s platform features into four broad categories. First we discuss the ‘For You’ page, the main page for viewing content, and the algorithmic recommender system that powers it. Next we identify and define the platform’s primary socially creative features and discuss how they encourage active and creative participation on TikTok. The third and fourth sections are a review of the video creation features and social media features that are not unique to TikTok but are useful for illustrating how familiar features are integrated, contested, iterated, and appropriated on a short-video platform.
After laying out the various features that facilitate social creativity on TikTok, we explore how they influence cultures of community building and activism. In chapter 3 we examine community formation on TikTok. The chapter is informed by Tönnies’ (1965 [1887]) concepts of Gesellschaft (‘society’, calculating and impersonal) and Gemeinschaft (‘community’, intimate and interpersonal), also employed by Ling (2012) in the study of mobile technologies and community building. We illustrate Gesellschaft on TikTok through a case study of ‘mainstream TikTok’, which is composed of the most globally popular TikTokers and determined via follower count. We profile some of these mainstream TikTokers as ‘nomads’, who have migrated to TikTok from other short-video platforms that were shuttered (e.g. Vine, Musical.ly), and as ‘natives’, who started on TikTok and became famous there. We illustrate Gemeinschaft on TikTok through an in-depth qualitative case study of JazzTok, a niche community of musicians who developed an intimate community by engaging in distributed creativity: they played music on TikTok together using socially creative features.
Chapter 4 presents two case studies of activism on TikTok: #forClimate and #saveTikTok. There we explore examples of how Gen Z TikTokers strategically use the platform’s socially creative features and vernacular cultures to inform, educate, and mobilize others. The first case study reviews ‘green memes’ and TikTok challenges that raise awareness and initiate action to combat the ongoing climate crisis. The second case study involves the collective effort to save TikTok in 2020, when the platform was facing the threat of being banned in the United States. We conclude this chapter by revisiting the role of circumscribed creativity in promoting TikTok activism.
Chapter 5 returns to our platformization analysis of TikTok by moving on to the market level. There we consider platform economies on TikTok. We first discuss the various advertising strategies that generate revenues on and for the platform. Next, we consider how practices of e-commerce such as daihuo (‘influencing someone’s decision to purchase’) are indicative of the challenges of parallel platformization. Daihuo is an example of a business model brought over from Douyin that for various reasons has not been as effective on TikTok as on its platform sibling. We also discuss live streaming as another example of a market mismatch between TikTok and Douyin. We then move on to business models that generate revenue for TikTok creators – including revenue in the form of virtual currency, influencer sponsorships, and the TikTok Creator Fund. We critique the precarity of platform labour on TikTok, exacerbated as it is by limited avenues of monetization and a general lack of transparency. We conclude this chapter by returning to our earlier argument that TikTok is a music-centric platform – which we do with the help of an illustrative case study of TikTok’s influence and impact on the music industry.
Chapter 6 takes our platformization analysis of TikTok to the level of governance. There we present additional struggles of parallel platformization, as evidenced by geopolitical skirmishes that resulted in TikTok’s being banned in some countries and threatened to be banned in others. We then discuss two forms of governance – of and by TikTok. First we focus on the copyright governance of TikTok; this is followed by an analysis of the governance of user visibility as managed by TikTok. Then we identify the contours of a strategic pattern, one of cultivating positive content, which is used by ByteDance repeatedly to respond to controversies that emerge at the platform governance level.
We end in chapter 7 with a summary of our main arguments and directions for future research. We argue that the development of TikTok has been shaped by geopolitical contestation and has given the direction of competition in the international short-video industry. Further, we point to tensions between automated curation and user control that can contribute, simultaneously, to a sense of agency and to a sense of powerlessness. We then restate our core arguments that TikTok represents an evolutionary step in short video, that audio is a central pillar in TikTok’s evolution, and that this evolution has opened the door to a more direct competition between two globally dominant platform ecosystems: Silicon Valley and China. We conclude this book with final thoughts about the future of TikTok and of the short-video format.
Notes
1
Visit
https://www.tiktok.com/@khaby.lame/video/6950627842518568197
.
2
‘Chug Jug with You’ (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0Uh3OJCx3o
) was recorded in late 2018 by YouTuber Leviathan, who was 13 at the time. It is a parody of the 2008 commercial hit ‘American Boy’ (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ic5vxw3eijY
) by British musical artist Estelle (featuring Kanye West) and is based on an 18-second chorus recorded by YouTuber CM Skits titled ‘Let’s Play Fortnite!!!’ (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yK5qHDMSXA
