This article is written with anecdotal experience from eight interviewees online. The experiences described appear to be consistent across most interviewees.
“60 seconds. Go!” You have 60 seconds to get TikTok famous. In these 60 seconds, you either do something fascinating, unique, creative, original, or positive, or you get lost in the sea of its 1 billion active users.
But not everyone can be fascinating or creative consistently, or indeed fully display their personalities in 60 seconds. It is incredibly difficult to convey your life experiences, your interesting stories, your hobbies, and ultimately, yourself in such a short timespan, and then to frame it in a way that people can easily relate to, to get them to want to see more from you.
Self-image
One thing that does convey consistently well in 60 seconds, though, is how you look. It is accepted scientifically that if you are more attractive, you are more likely to do well in life, to be perceived as more trustworthy and honest, and, of course, as a more viable as a partner to other people. Before I say anything else, I am not arguing that everyone who is successful on TikTok has not worked to achieve this success. In the same way that in Hollywood there are beloved actors who are just average-looking, many TikTok’s most successful people are incredibly skilled at dancing, drawing, or singing, and not just pretty faces. Of the top four TikTok accounts by followers, two are trained/professional dancers, one is a very good singer, and another is an extremely skilled video editor.
Still, you’d be hard pressed to not notice that in general, the most successful on TikTok are also among those that are most attractive. This is either a feature of the platform, or a fault, depending on how you view it. In 60 seconds, and often far less, as TikTok videos vary in length, thousands of people are forced to make a snap judgement on you — whether your video is worth liking, whether you are worth following or sharing. People do this for every TikTok they view, and naturally, the more attractive people rise to the top, as users are more likely to view the video of an attractive person for longer and share it.
This all means that an average TikTok feed will be dominated by attractive people. Especially during lockdown, this can have devastating effects on a person’s self-image. If you only see extremely attractive people everyday, you will start comparing yourself to them, thinking you are not enough, that you do not match up to these standards, and wondering how it’s possible to even compete. You will be disconnected from reality at least to some degree, and start thinking less of yourself, because everyone else you see is so much more attractive. And this is while ignoring the fact that we judge our looks overly harshly too, because we see ourselves in the best and worst of our times, dishevelled and tired with bags under our eyes as well as dressed up and happy. On TikTok, only one side ever rises to the top. Seeing hundreds of these videos a day, it’s easy to forget that this is not how the average person looks, and, just like every other type of social media, TikTok does not represent real life.
Attention Spans
The next danger of TikTok is its effect on attention spans. TikTok, just like most other types of social media, is extremely addictive. Each time that you scroll and see something you like, your brain gets a hit of dopamine, encourages you to repeat this action. So you scroll again, and again, building our attachment to the cycle of watching new content for hours at a time, refreshing your feeling of excitement and interest every 60 seconds. Now, while the jury in scientific communities is still out on whether TikTok itself has permanently shortened our attention span, there is evidence to suggest social media in general has, and plenty of anecdotal evidence for TikTok specifically.
In our lives it is important that we can focus for more than a few minutes at a time, and give things a chance to become interesting for us even if they don’t pull us in at the start. We’ve all heard horror stories from our parents about seemingly never-ending meetings where the boss drones on for hours about vague goals, company image, motives, and delegation of work. Our work culture is changing, but long meetings do seem to be something that will stick around. Imagine sitting in an important Zoom meeting for hours. Every few minutes, your brain will itch to do something else — tab out, check your email, or go on TikTok.
Even if we don’t have to be in these meetings, we will still have to interact with long pieces of information, such as essays, articles, school textbooks, stats, and so on, and it is crucial that we don’t lose our ability to absorb important points from these, rather than taking out our phones and immersing ourselves in TikTok at the slightest hint of boredom. Students shouldn’t be blamed entirely for zoning out during online lessons, going on their phones under the table or watching YouTube in the background. I have little doubt, though that online learning has been less effective in part because social media has lessened our ability to focus on something important but not stimulating, or wait for something to get good.
Extreme Social Media Bubbles
TikTok, finally, is the perfect example of the ‘virtual bubble’ brought to its logical endpoint. It is filled with insular, esoteric communities that seem extreme to an outsider, but perfectly normal and accepting to someone who has spent time in them. Being in a bubble is dangerous in a lot of ways ╴politically, culturally, and so on. There’s an expression that’s quite common on TikTok which I think sums this up perfectly “I’m on … TikTok” again. This can be “straight” TikTok, “emo” TikTok, and so on. But the key part of this is that you are on what seems to be an entirely different version of TikTok, something that is a complete deviation from your normal feed and something you were not aware existed in its current form until you stumbled across it. You were entirely comfortable in your community, and you don’t want to be out of it.
TikTok’s algorithm makes sure the only TikTok you see is the one you like. It measures every aspect of your interaction in the app — how long you watch each video for, whether you like it, share it, check the creator’s profile, scroll through the affiliated hashtags, and so on. This is a far cry from social media in its infancy, which was far less effective at caging us into a bubble — us having to “follow” or “subscribe” to the channels we liked, and only over time transforming our home page into something made uniquely for us. TikTok does this in a matter of minutes, from the moment that you open the app. It pulls you into a bubble without you even noticing, as the diversity of views displayed to you in the app slowly narrows with every “like”. You don’t even need to follow the creators you like to be fed only their content — the central feature of TikTok, its “For You” page — rarely even displays content from people you already follow.
Let’s take a hypothetical and describe the dangers of being pulled in so easily into a specific community. You may feel slightly down one day, and out of the 100 TikToks you watch that day, one comes up moping about depression, about how unfair and hard life is, the creator crying with sad music in the background. Normally, you’d scroll past this, but today you watch it halfway . Maybe you don’t do anything active to say this content is appealing, such as giving it a like or checking through the associated hashtags, but TikTok instantly knows this content is appealing to you. The next day, it might show you four sad TikToks, instead of just one. And the cycle has begun. Negative emotions rub off on others, and as you naturally start to see less positive content and more negative content, you feel more depressed. You interact more with ‘depression TikTok’, and soon your entire feed is nothing but depression. You’re convinced that it’s normal to feel this way: after all you only interact with people who feel the same as you. Others in real life “don’t understand your pain”, are “comfortably naive”, and so on. Only in your TikTok community do you find refuge, and, unless someone pulls you out, you end up stuck in a rut.
Or, let’s take the example of “weed TikTok”. TikTok’s offical rules say it does “not allow the depiction, promotion, or trade of drugs or other controlled substances.’’. Unfortunately for TikTok, there are simply too many videos uploaded each day for its moderators to be able to censor them all, and communities of weed smokers obviously won’t report one of their own. Now, I am not on a moral crusade against marijuana smoking. It’s a free choice a person makes, and, just like alcohol, in moderation it’s relatively harmless. But, as you get pulled into weed TikTok in the same way, certain unhealthy habits become normalized to you, whether consciously or not. Someone may post a video half-joking about how it’s fine, or doesn’t really matter to them, if they are high at work, if they spend vast amounts of their money on weed each week, or smoke weed every day and aren’t happy when they’re sober.. Subconsciously, you will start thinking the same way — that it’s perfectly fine to smoke constantly, that it is normal to spend huge amounts of money on it each week. Once again, only your community understands you — you reflect it and it reflects your life.
But from an outsider’s perspective, you’re doing something extremely unhealthy. To the average person, it seems unnatural and worrying that you are not sober at work, that you’re burning through your cash each week, that your room at home stinks of weed every time they walk in and you’re only happy when you’re high. You’re not aware of this, but you are being hurt by it. Your opportunities for escape get narrower and narrower, and something else needs to click for you to realize you need to make a change to improve your life. You lose an important element of control and self-reflection — that’s the final consequence of being pulled into a bubble.
I don’t see any benefits to keeping TikTok on your phone. I really don’t. You lose hours of your day, hurt your self-image, ruin your attention span, and, to top it all off, narrow your worldview and normalize the un-normal, often to your own detriment.
