Originally posted by Vincent Dong
By Vincent Dong on February 10, 2019
TikTok (Chinese: 抖音) is an app which provides users a platform to share their short videos. In the past two years, TikTok has become so popular that it has become an icon of subculture, and many young people are even addicted to this app. This has already become a widespread social phenomenon in China and has caused some negative impact.
Why is TikTok so addictive? How do the developers make users addicted? Why users can’t live without TikTok? As educational technologists, what can we learn from TikTok?
These are the questions I would like to explore in my assignment A1, and I am very glad to share my findings with you. Please feel free to click this link to get more details. Cheers!
I consider TikTok the quicker and modernized version of YouTube. I was fascinated by YouTube some 15 years ago and can understand the charm of TikTok for the youngsters easily. In my professional activities, TikTok helps a lot with teaching English pronunciation and the language in general
I chose this post, originally written by Vincent Dong because I have recently begun developing an interest in TikTok, and how it may be examined as a unique form of media and content creation.
When TikTok emerged here in Hong Kong, I found myself fairly immediately irritated with it. I am a Drama teacher, and I strive to encourage my students to be original, creative, and to take calculated risks when they create work. However, as I was seeing my students begin to ‘make a quick TikTok’ before my classes, I became frustrated with how contrived it all seemed. It felt like a sequel to the ‘Orange Justice’, Flossing, or even dances like the Macarena (for our generation); contrived and a mere copy of something the students had seen someone else do. So, I immediately wrote it off as a form of social media I was not likely to be interested in.
Recently, a younger friend was talking to me about TikTok, and encouraged me to check it out. I told her what my opinion was, and she wisely responded with ‘I can see how you would feel that way, but there are a lot of creators who don’t just copy trends, but reinterpret them’. She subscribes to the accounts I use for my dance life, and told me that she felt like I had something to offer the world of TikTok. Her words were ‘You’re really creative and your Instagram is really good. I think you could bring that to TikTok, like you could hashtag your videos #createdontcopy.’ She got my attention, and I decided to check it out.
My forays into the world of TikTok have not yet resulted in the creation of any content of my own (yet), but I have found that my friend was right; there is loads of really interesting, creative, and funny content to be viewed. I also found myself fascinated with exploring the conventions of the form, and what made some videos so successful, while others ‘flopped’. I decided I wanted to have a good, solid understanding of the medium before I started making my own material. As a Drama teacher, I also wonder if there’s something there in terms of exploring different video mediums, and how the mise-en-scene and editing of videos for different platforms could be studied, learned, and manipulated. I think there’s something there.
I plan to take a closer look at TikTok as a standalone genre of video, and will eventually create some of my own as an experiment. I’ll keep you posted!
Suzzie