essay meaning tiktok

TikTok: Impact on Human Creativity Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

TikTok is a short-form video platform with user-generated content where billions of people post their creative ideas. It boosts communication, provides knowledge and entertainment, and affects the human lifestyle. However, this app elicits criticism from people who believe that, despite its benefits to the lives of humans, it is stifling their creativity and wasting time. The idea that technology is the parasite of creativity has been argued several times since various individuals have different perspectives on this claim. Nevertheless, Tiktok is a revolutionary gift that, when utilized well, stimulates creativity while delivering visual pieces of information and hinders creativity when not used appropriately.

The earliest effects of TikTok on individuality started from the first moment of its launch in 2012. Although Chinese developers initially created this app and named it Musical.ly for mimicking and lip-syncing, it turned out to be a more meaningful platform (Tucker, 2020). The reason is that in 2017 TikTok became popular in the US by being downloaded 80 million times. This obsession attracted new app owners that changed its name and focus, making it more relevant for the sizeable audience where many artists could launch their careers. Artificial intelligence facilitates its success, ensuring users watch only desired videos based on an algorithm and attracting more than a million Gen Z and Gen Alpha individuals (Qiyang and Hung, 2019). Today it is an app for people who enjoy videos of comedy, animal tricks, and helpful information edited by amateurs and professional graphic designers.

Some arguments in favor of TikTok’s positive effect assert that it enhances self-expression since it offers information, and information does not inhibit human creativity. It is reinforced by the notion that individuals still need creativity to comprehend and intervene in the app’s data. More importantly, TikTok does not promote the picture-perfectness of Instagram, daily routines on Twitter, or long videos on YouTube (Qiyang and Hung, 2019). Instead, in this social media, natural, be it excellent or ugly, video content comes first, which destroys all borders limiting human creativity. Since people use the platform to celebrate being themselves, demonstrating that no one is perfect, it allows users to use self-humor creatively (Chu et al., 2022). If people rarely post their outright stories on Instagram, they do not hide any exciting information in TikTok because the audience always welcomes unusual experiences and perspectives there.

Another critical feature of TikTok that attracts an audience is its accessibility, meaning everyone can deliver their message. Even the general concept of TikTok justifies that people can do amazing things to compete for the audience if provided with a new platform and tools. Such people prove that TikTok is extending the possibilities of visual arts such as graphic design, music creation, and filmmaking by potentially encouraging more individuals to join the creative community. For example, Jason Derulo’s TikTok profile is full of slow-motion videos and highly edited productions, which makes him a part of the online community (Kenitz, 2021). Even after gaining enough popularity, content creators must post creative videos and interact with the audiences to grab them. Thus, the increasing success of the platform proves that it fosters creative potential where the videos on TikTok become the source of global imagination.

However, such advanced opportunities provided by TikTok to connect users from various backgrounds with realistic stories make content creators worry more about their creativity. It becomes more challenging to generate compelling ideas in a competitive social media like TikTok since app owners put limitations on the posted videos. For instance, influencers and communication designers should maximize their imagination and utilize better video visuals and filters to provide more compelling content in 60 seconds (Chu et al., 2022). They stand out from the rest as long as they put more effort and time into each video. Success in TikTok requires users to rely on softwares utilized by graphic and communication designers to generate high-quality videos. Most of them never completed cinematography studies but succeeded due to many failures, long experiments, and vital creativity.

Some people oppose TikTok, believing in its negative effects because adults are engrossed in the platform that needs more innovative activities that may foster creativity. When people spend all their free time gadget scrolling instead of physically engaging in games, sports, or recreational activities, they impede imagination. Obsession with TikTok is why people refuse to complete their daily tasks (Lawson, 2022). Thus, the lifestyle of couch potatoes with electronic devices in their hands is proof of consumerism rather than creativity.

Another reason TikTok limits creativity relates to the content published on the platform. Since creativity is about being authentic and generating innovative ideas, an existing algorithm that promotes videos with “optimized hashtags, video length, and the time at which the video is posted” (Lawson, 2022, para. 8). Hence, it becomes almost impossible to consider somebody creative if he constantly thinks inside the platform’s checkbox. Moreover, many duplicates with the same message and content steal ideas from other TikTok profiles, meaning that users posting videos cannot create original products. It happens because some trends on social media have become popular, so it is impossible to neglect them. It is how the posts that intended to highlight the originality of some groups become over-popularized trends.

The points mentioned above highlight that TikTok can enhance and inhibit human creativity. Finding a balance between two extremes is critical to foster imagination. When people do not spend all day scrolling through their feeds, they have enough time for physical and mental activities stimulating their creativity. Regarding content creators, they should learn to provide their ideas and visual arts to grab an audience instead of copying their competitors. If the initial concept of the platform requiring people to be realistic about their thoughts and experiences remains, there will be enough outstanding creators with authentic styles. Since TikTok brings everything within reach to the point where people no longer strain their minds to figure out how to make something available, engaging with the audience to find standard solutions could be helpful for creativity. The most vital aspect is sharing ideas, talking, and exchanging views when individuals congregate in a room instead of watching TikTok videos.

To conclude, TikTok is a video platform with billions of users worldwide enjoying funny and helpful content. It stifles human creativity by requiring individuals to spend all their time on electronics, making everything accessible, copying everyone, and fitting into TikTok’s promotional algorithm. However, it also fosters visual arts and imagination by providing valuable information and exciting tools and encouraging people to be honest. Nevertheless, it is possible to control the use of TikTok to compensate for the lack of uniqueness and substance. If people learn to post authentic ideas, limit time spent online, and utilize TikTok to their advantage, global trends of passive consumerism shift to creativity.

Reference List

Chu, S. C., Deng, T., and Mundel, J. (2022) “ The impact of personalization on viral behavior intentions on TikTok: The role of perceived creativity, authenticity, and need for uniqueness ,” Journal of Marketing Communications , 2(1), pp. 1-20. Web.

Kenitz, D. (2021) “ 13 TikTok starts and how they rose to fam ,” Skillshare Blog . Web.

Lawson, L. (2022) “ Art and algorithms: How TikTok is threatening creativity ,” The Boar , Web.

Qiyang, Z. and Jung, H. (2019) “Learning and sharing creative skills with short videos: A case study of user behavior in tiktok and bilibili,” International Association of Societies of Design research, 5(2), pp. 1–15. Web.

Tucker, J. A. (2020) “ What brilliant TikTok reveals about human creativity ,” American Institute for Economic Research, Web.

• Effect of Social Media on Junior and High School
• U.S. Government's Recent Ban on Chinese Firm TikTok
• Social Media and Change of Society
• Twitter and Facebook: The Core Competencies
• Oreo’s Social Media Strategies to Maximize Online Presence
• Social Media Monitoring and Analysis
• Instagram: Promotion of Loneliness
• The Hidden Influence of Social Networks
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2024, May 28). TikTok: Impact on Human Creativity. https://ivypanda.com/essays/tiktok-impact-on-human-creativity/

"TikTok: Impact on Human Creativity." IvyPanda , 28 May 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/tiktok-impact-on-human-creativity/.

IvyPanda . (2024) 'TikTok: Impact on Human Creativity'. 28 May.

IvyPanda . 2024. "TikTok: Impact on Human Creativity." May 28, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/tiktok-impact-on-human-creativity/.

1. IvyPanda . "TikTok: Impact on Human Creativity." May 28, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/tiktok-impact-on-human-creativity/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "TikTok: Impact on Human Creativity." May 28, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/tiktok-impact-on-human-creativity/.

Another Word

From the writing center at the university of wisconsin-madison.

#essayhack: What TikTok can Teach Writing Centers about Student Perceptions of College Writing

By Holly Berkowitz, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

There is a widespread perception that TikTok, the popular video-sharing social media platform, is primarily a tool of distraction where one mindlessly scrolls through bite-sized bits of content. However, due to the viewer’s ability to engage with short-form video content, it is undeniable that TikTok is also a platform from which users gain information; whether this means following a viral dance tutorial or learning how to fold a fitted sheet, TikTok houses millions of videos that serve as instructional tutorials that provides tips or how-tos for its over one billion active users. 

That TikTok might be considered a learning tool also has implications for educational contexts. Recent research has revealed that watching or even creating TikToks in classrooms can aid learning objectives, particularly relating to language acquisition or narrative writing skills. In this post, I discuss  the conventions of and consequences for TikToks that discuss college writing. Because of the popularity of videos that spotlight “how-tos” or “day in the life” style content, looking at essay or college writing TikTok can be a helpful tool for understanding some larger trends and student perceptions of writing. Due to the instructional nature of TikToks and the ways that students might be using the app for advice, these videos can be viewed as parallel or ancillary to the advice that a Writing Center tutor might provide.

A search for common hashtags including the words “essay,” “college writing,” or “essay writing hack” yields hundreds of videos that pertain to writing at the college level. Although there is a large variety in content due to the sheer amount of content, this post focuses on two genres of videos as they represent a large portion of what is shared: first, videos that provide tips or how-tos for certain AI tools or assignment genres and second, videos that invite the viewer to accompany the creator as they write a paper under a deadline. Shared themes include attempts to establish peer connections and comfort viewers who procrastinate while writing, a focus on writing speed and concrete deliverables (page count, word limit, or hours to write), and an emphasis on digital tools or AI software (especially that which is marked as “not cheating”). Not only does a closer examination into these videos help us meet writers where they are more precisely, but it also draws writing center workers’ attention to lesser known digital tools or “hacks” that students are using for their assignments.

“How to write” Videos

Videos in the “how to” style are instructional and advice-dispensing in tone. Often, the creator utilizes a digital writing aid or provides a set of writing tips or steps to follow. Whether these videos spotlight assistive technologies that use AI, helpful websites, or suggestions for specific forms of writing, they often position writing as a roadblock or adversary. Videos of this nature attempt to reach viewers by promising to make writing easier, more approachable, or just faster when working under a tight deadline; they almost always assume the writer in question has left their writing task to the last possible moment. It’s not surprising then that the most widely shared examples of this form of content are videos with titles like “How to speed-write long papers” or “How to make any essay longer” (this one has 32 million views). It is evident that this type of content attempts to target students who suffer from writing-related anxiety or who tend to procrastinate while writing.

Sharing “hacks” online is a common practice that manifests in many corners of TikTok where content creators demonstrate an easier or more efficient way of achieving a task (such as loading a dishwasher) or obtaining a result (such as finding affordable airline tickets). The same principle applies to #essay TikTok, where writing advice is often framed as a “hack” for writing faster papers, longer papers, or papers more likely to result in an A. This content uses a familiar titling convention: How to write X (where X might be a specific genre like a literature review, or just an amount of pages or words); How to write X in X amount of time; and How to write X using this software or AI program. The amount of time is always tantalizingly brief, as two examples—“How to write a 5 page essay in 2 mins” and “How to write an essay in five minutes!! NO PLAGIARISM!!”—attest to. While some of these are silly or no longer useful methods of getting around assignment parameters, they introduce viewers to helpful research and writing aids and sometimes even spotlight Writing Center best practices. For instance, a video by creator @kaylacp called “Research Paper Hack” shows viewers how to use a program called PowerNotes to organize and code sources; a video by @patches has almost seven million views and demonstrates using an AI bot to both grade her paper and provide substantive feedback. Taken as a whole, this subsect of TikTok underscores that there is a ready audience for content that purports to assist writers in meeting the deliverables of a writing assignment using a path of least resistance.

Similarly, TikTok contains myriad videos that position the creator as a sort of expert in college writing and dispense tips for improving academic writing and style. These videos are often created by upperclassmen who claim to frequently receive As on essays and tend to use persuasive language in the style of an infomercial, such as “How to write a college paper like a pro,” “How to write research papers more efficiently in 5 easy steps!” or “College students, if you’re not using this feature, you’re wasting your time.” The focus in these videos is even more explicit than those mentioned above, as college students are addressed in the titles and captions directly. This is significant  because it prompts users to engage with this content as they might with a Writing Center tutor or tutoring more generally. These videos are sites where students are learning how to write more efficiently but also learning how their college peers view and treat the writing process. 

The “how to write” videos share several common themes, most prevalent of which is an emphasis on concrete deliverables—you will be able to produce this many pages in this many minutes. They also share a tendency to introduce or spotlight different digital tools and assistive technologies that make writing more expedient; although several videos reference or demonstrate how to use ChatGPT or OpenAI, most creators attempt to show viewers less widely discussed platforms and programs. As parallel forms of writing instruction, these how-tos tend to focus on quantity over quality and writing-as-product. However, they also showcase ways that AI can be helpful and generative for writers at all stages. Most notably they direct our attention to the fact that student writers consistently encounter writing- and essay- related content while scrolling TikTok.

Write “with me” Videos

Just as the how-to style videos target writers who view writing negatively and may have a habit of procrastinating writing assignments, write “with me” videos invite the viewer to join the creator as they work. These videos almost always include a variation of the phrase— “Write a 5- page case analysis w/ me” or “pull an all nighter with me while I write a 10- page essay.” One of the functions of this convention is to establish a peer-to-peer connection with the viewer, as they are brought along while the creator writes, experiences writer’s block, takes breaks, but ultimately completes their assignment in time. Similarly to the videos discussed above, these “with me” videos also center on writing under a deadline and thus emphasize the more concrete deliverables of their assignments. As such, the writing process is often made less visible in favor of frequent cuts and timestamps that show the progression toward a page or word count goal.

One of the most common effects of “with me” videos is to assure the viewer that procrastinating writing is part and parcel of the college experience. As the content creators grapple with and accept their own writing anxieties or deferring habits, they demonstrate for the viewer that it is possible to be both someone who struggles with writing and someone who can make progress on their papers. In this way, these videos suggest to students that they are not alone in their experiences; not only do other college students feel overwhelmed with writing or leave their papers until the day before they are due, but you can join a fellow student as they tackle the essay writing process. One popular video by @mercuryskid with over 6 million views follows them working on a 6000 word essay for which they have received several extensions, and although they don’t finish by the end of the video, their openness about the struggles they experience while writing may explain its appeal. 

Indeed, in several videos of this kind the creator centers their procrastination as a means of inviting the viewer in; often the video will include the word in the title, such as “write 2 essays due at 11:59 tonight with me because I am a chronic procrastinator” or “write the literature essay i procrastinated with me.” Because of this, establishing a peer connection with the hypothetical viewer is paramount; @itskamazing’s video in which she writes a five page paper in three hours ends with her telling the viewer, “If you’re in college, you’re doing great. Let’s just knock this semester out.” One video titled “Writing essays doesn’t need to be stressful” shows a college-aged creator explaining what tactics she uses for outlining and annotating research to make sure she feels prepared when she begins to write in earnest. Throughout, she directly hails the viewer as “you” and attempts to cultivate a sense of familiarity with the person on the other side of the screen; in some moments her advice feels like listening in on a one-sided Writing Center session.

A second aspect of these “with me” videos is an intense focus on the specifics of a writing task. The titles of these videos usually follow a formula that invites the viewer with the writer as they write X amount in X time, paralleling the structure of how-to-write videos. The emphasis here, due to the last-minute nature of the writing contexts, is always on speed: “write a 2000- word essay with me in 4.5 hours” or “Join me as I write a 10- page essay that is due at 11:59pm.” Since these videos often need to cover large swaths of time during which the creator is working, there are several jumps forward in time, sped up footage, and text stamps or zoom-ins that update the viewer on how many pages or words the writer has completed since the last update. Overall, this brand of content demonstrates how product-focused writers become when large amounts of writing are completed in a single setting. However, it also makes this experience seem more manageable to viewers, as we frequently see writers in videos take naps and breaks during these high-stakes writing sessions. Furthermore, although the writers complain and appear stressed throughout, these videos tend to close with the writer submitting their papers and celebrating their achievement.

Although these videos may send mixed messages to college students using TikTok who experience struggles with writing productivity, they can be helpful for viewers as they demonstrate the shared nature of these struggles and concerns. Despite the overarching emphasis on the finished product, the documentary-style of this content shows how writing can be a fraught process. For tutors or those removed from the experience of being in college, these videos also illuminate some of the reasons students procrastinate writing; we see creators juggling part-time jobs, other due dates, and family obligations. This genre of TikToks shows the power that social media platforms have due to the way they can amplify the shared experience of students.

To conclude, I gesture toward a few of the takeaways that #essay and #collegewriting TikTok might provide for those who work in Writing Centers, especially those who frequently encounter students who struggle with procrastination. First, because TikTok is a video-sharing platform, the content often shows a mixture of writing process and product. Despite a heavy emphasis in these videos on the finished product that a writer turns in to be graded, several videos necessarily also reveal the steps that go into writing, even marathon sessions the night before a paper is due. We primarily see forward progress but we also see false starts and deletions; we mostly see the writer once they have completed pre-writing tasks but we also see analyzing a prompt, outlining, and brainstorming. Additionally, this genre of TikTok is instructive in that it shows how often students wait until before a paper is due to begin and just how many writers are working solely to meet a deadline or deliverable. While as Writing Center workers we cannot do much to shift this mindset, we can make a more considerable effort to focus on time management and executive functioning skills in our sessions. Separating the essay writing process into manageable chunks or steps appears to be a skill that college students are already seeking to develop independently when they engage on social media, and Writing Centers are equipped to help students refine these habits. Finally, it is worth considering the potential for university Writing Center TikTok accounts. A brief survey of videos created by Writing Center staff reveals that they draw on similar themes and tend to emphasize product and deliverables—for example, a video titled “a passing essay grade” that shows someone going into the center and receiving an A+ on a paper. Instead, these accounts could create a space for Writing Centers to actively contribute to the discourse on college writing that currently occupies the app and create content that parallels a specific Writing Center or campus’s values.

Holly Berkowitz is the Coordinator of the Writing and Communication Center at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She recently received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she also worked at the UW-Madison Writing Center. Although she does not post her own content, she is an avid consumer of TikTok videos.

Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Sociology of Media and Communication — TikTok

Essays on Tiktok

Exploring the debate: should tiktok be banned, the controversy surrounding the ban of tiktok, made-to-order essay as fast as you need it.

Each essay is customized to cater to your unique preferences

+ experts online

The Impact of Tiktok on Society and Culture

The influence of tiktok on child development, tiktok's impact on social media, impact of social media on mental health, let us write you an essay from scratch.

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Relevant topics

• Social Media
• Media Analysis
• Effects of Social Media
• Collaboration
• Discourse Community
• Cultural Appropriation

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

Ohio State nav bar

The Ohio State University

• BuckeyeLink
• Find People
• Search Ohio State

Tiktok and Its Evolving Approach to Writing

Can an app for making viral dances point us to our next steps in how we communicate with each other?

In the digital era, we are seeing a push to leverage the new technologies we use to better communicate. From comics to social media, many experts are showing that the limitations of pen and paper can be circumvented online if we only take them seriously.

Our writing can go beyond words. We have already have been sharing emojis and memes to communicate meaning for years. While some apps like Twitter are changing how we write , we are seeing a resurgence of ideograms and symbols from apps such as TikTok. Apps like these use audio, visual, and writing at the same time to communicate meaning. For example, this TikTok’s meaning can only be fully grasped with sound, visuals, and writing.

Here we see what Scott Mcleod was talking about in reference to comic books and graphic novels: expansion beyond what physical media can give us. But, these new combinations of media open up an entirely different problem: accessibility. People with disabilities may find it hard to grasp the full meaning or create media like this. But, many users and Tiktok itself work to address this issue, such as creators who work to caption their videos or the new speech to text feature .  Here are examples of both these features being used on the app.

As one can see, social media apps like TikTok are expanding what we consider writing and how we use the tools in front of us to communicate. By making it easy to combine multiple forms of media, apps like these show what language in the digital age can look like, and how we can better increase accessibility for all.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Find anything you save across the site in your account

TikTok and the Vibes Revival

By Kyle Chayka

Deep into the thoughtless hypnotism of TikTok one afternoon, I came upon an anonymous urban scene from inside a residential tower in Manchester, England. On an upper floor, beside huge windows shrouded in fog, a man was floating on his back in a gleaming pool, to the soundtrack of the plaintive Frank Ocean song “White Ferrari.” The ten-second video was hashtagged #vibin. In another clip, a woman demonstrated her morning routine, with shots of rumpled linen bedsheets, navy-blue satin pajamas, and a steaming mug of matcha, along with brief glimpses of other objects: a monstera plant, a burning chunk of palo santo, a busy street outside. Altogether, they evoked a mood of calm, enlightened, prettified productivity. The video was hashtagged #vibes. “I love the vibes at night here,” the caption of yet another TikTok montage read: a dim apartment lit by a pink neon sign that says “Where Love Lives,” a wandering Shiba Inu, an orb lamp on top of a Picasso art book, a wall-mounted flat-screen playing the popular ambient-music YouTube channel “lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to.” If I had to pinpoint it, I’d say that the video’s vibe was chill Gen-Z good taste, the world of a teen-ager whose parents have given up on curfews and screen-time restrictions: midnight-basement-desktop-computer vibes.

These brief flashes of seemingly normal life, compressed into short videos, are among TikTok’s bread-and-butter genres, and they have taken over my algorithmically curated feed on the app. Where others might get meme dances or practical jokes, I only see chill vibes. Casually cooking a meal in a swaying sailboat on the open Atlantic Ocean is a vibe. So is slaloming down the road on a skateboard to Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” while swigging cranberry juice, as Nathan Apodaca did in a now famous TikTok. We know the meaning of the word “vibe,” of course. It’s a placeholder for an abstract quality that you can’t pin down—an ambience (“a laid-back vibe”). It’s the reason that you like or dislike something or someone (good vibes vs. bad). It’s an intuition with no obvious explanation (“just a vibe I get”). Many vibes don’t have specific names, but some do. Saudade , the Portuguese word for a bittersweet longing, could count as a vibe. So, too, could the Japanese iki , an attitude of casually disinterested elegance, or the German fernweh , the longing to be somewhere far away, evoked by distant vistas or unknown forests. ( Hygge , the Danish quality of contented coziness, is a vibe that has been wholly commercialized in the United States.)

In the social-media era, though, “vibe” has come to mean something more like a moment of audiovisual eloquence, a “sympathetic resonance” between a person and her environment, as Robin James, a professor of philosophy at U.N.C. Charlotte wrote in a recent newsletter . What a haiku is to language, a vibe is to sensory perception: a concise assemblage of image, sound, and movement. (#Aesthetic is sometimes used to mark vibes, but that term is predominantly visual.) A vibe can be positive, negative, beautiful, ugly, or just unique. It can even become a quality in itself: if something is vibey, it gives off an intense vibe or is particularly amenable to vibes. Vibes are a medium for feeling, the kind of abstract understanding that comes before words put a name to experience. That pre-linguistic quality makes them well suited to a social-media landscape that is increasingly prioritizing audio, video, and images over text. Through our screens, vibes are being constantly emitted and received.

The word “vibe” is short for vibration—something that resonates and echoes, suffusing a space. In the early twentieth century, the term became associated with the vibraphone, a cousin of the marimba, which uses motorized fans beneath its bars to achieve a vibier sound. At the time of its invention, in the nineteen-twenties, musicians weren’t sure whether its nickname should be singular or plural, vibe or vibes—the latter eventually stuck. The instrument’s sound today immediately evokes a whole range of associations: Tropicália music, the mid-twentieth century’s obsession with Hawaii, shallow cosmopolitanism, and nostalgia hovering between sincere and ironic.

“Vibe” as slang, referring to an aura or feeling, emerged in the sixties, in California, and gave the word its enduring hippie associations. The underground paper Berkeley Barb made frequent use of it as early as 1965. The following year, the Beach Boys hit “Good Vibrations” exposed the slang to broader audiences. The song is about nigh-subconscious connection, being on the same wavelength: “I’m picking up good vibrations / She’s giving me excitations.” (There are no actual vibraphones on the track, but it does feature the equally vibey electro-theremin .) In a similar vein, the young writer Bibi Wein described vibes as “spirits touching” in “ The Runaway Generation ,” her 1970 investigation of rebellious American youth. But soon enough the word was being applied to just about anything. In 1973, the journal Cultures observed that “a roomful of people, a city or even a political campaign has its own set of vibrations.”

Like many trends that begin on the cultural vanguard, the word lost some of its potency as it was taken up by the mainstream. (“Vibes,” the word, “has no meaning for me,” the choreographer Trisha Brown said in the Performing Arts Journal in 1976.) Though we might often refer to an “eighties vibe” today—recalling the intersection, say, of shiny fabric, big hair, and smoke machines—the eighties and nineties were not particularly vibe-obsessed decades. Perhaps those decades were too rigid, too dominated by the pursuit of capital, to be resonant or receptive. ( Vibe magazine, founded in 1993, presented a commodified view of hip-hop culture.) But during those decades vibes became a subject of philosophical fascination. In an article for the journal Thesis Eleven , from 1993, the German philosopher Gernot Böhme identified “atmosphere” as the basis for a new aesthetics of perception, a kind of over-all feeling that has much in common with vibe. Heidegger had used “mood” to describe the quality of being in the world, and Walter Benjamin had identified “aura” as the feeling inspired by the presence of a unique work of art, say, a painting. But Böhme saw much more mundane things—cosmetics, advertising, interior decoration—exuding their own kind of atmosphere, comprising an “aesthetics of everyday life.”

The political theorist Jane Bennett had a similar epiphany while gazing at a pile of trash in the gutter one sunny morning, an experience she recounted in her 2010 book “ Vibrant Matter .” The discarded objects seemed suddenly invested with meaning: “the glove, the rat, the pollen, the bottle cap, and the stick started to shimmer and spark,” she wrote, forming a tableau “with the street, with the weather that morning, with me.” In other words, the entire moment had a vibe, greater than the sum of its parts and inextricable from each of them. Bennett argued that capitalism had encouraged us to ignore such vibes: a consumerist society, in which things are constantly thrown away and replaced, “conceals the vitality of matter.”

In some ways, the rise of digital life allowed for a vibe revival. Online, we could collect and curate vibes. As with tracking rare species of birds, spotting a vibe—and recording it—became an end goal in itself. The musician Ezra Koenig did so, back in 2005, on a blog he called Internet Vibes : “BRITISH/RAIN/GREY VIBES,” “late 90’s Radiohead/global anxiety/airports/bleak technological future,” and “FRESH/CLEAN” like a Morton Williams supermarket. That was before the advent of camera phones, which allowed us to capture vibes in the real world, and before the rise of Instagram, which might have been social media’s first native platform for vibes. There you could compose a mood in images, communicating an over-all personality. The overhead life-style-tableaux shot that became the dominant Instagram cliché presented a vibe: the arid cool of sunlight, marble, and cappuccino. Instead of Bennett’s resonant pile of trash, however, these assemblages were often used to sell something—if not a specific product, then the “brand” of the influencers posting them. Robin James describes this phenomenon as “vibe-capitalism.” If tightly associated with a product or company, a vibe can become a kind of free-floating commercial, including or alienating audiences based on their tastes. Think of the association of healthy-yet-intoxicating Californian bohemianism with the clothing brand Reformation or of turbocharged techno-masculinity with Tesla cars.

Whereas Instagram’s main form is the composed tableau, captured in a single still image or unedited video, TikTok’s is the collection of real-world observations, strung together in a filmic montage. (Though last year Instagram added a new feature, Reels, in an attempt to compete.) TikTok’s technology makes it easy to crop video clips and set them to evocative popular songs: instant vibes. Its “For You” feed curates a mélange of content algorithmically, based on each user’s patterns of engagement. The result is a platform that runs on vignettes, superficial flashes of discrete sensation. As Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden, the Amsterdam-based founders of the avant-garde film-and-design collective Metahaven , put it to me, “TikTok provides a rebuke to the truism that people want narratives.” The man I saw paddling in his Manchester-skyscraper lap pool is not trying to explain or sell anything—he is simply vibing, and the rest of us are just watching, consuming that state of harmony without expecting anything more from it. The other day, I messaged that man on TikTok to ask about the video (which he now has set to private). His name is Nigel Kabvina, and he’s a twenty-five-year-old bartender. “I was thinking about the feeling of trying to unwind,” he told me. “The song brings me back to a time before adulting stress and responsibility.”

Vibes were made for the Internet not just because they’re audiovisual but because, like all memes, they are participatory. Anyone can assemble her own version. They’re not scarce or limited-edition. Replication doesn’t cheapen them. On social media, users not only curate vibes but generate new ones. “Cursed,” for instance, is an Internet vibe that signifies “increasingly generalized feelings of anxiety and malaise,” as Jia Tolentino has written , evoked by disquieting images of things where they don’t belong—say, a Chuck E. Cheese automaton left decaying in a dump, gracefully “ vibing ” despite its circumstances. The more recent “cringe” is a secondhand embarrassment or shame that can also be consumed proactively as content, like a horror movie. On TikTok, some of the aesthetic mood boards that began on Tumblr in the twenty-tens have become tribal as vibes: cottagecore, a twee-leaning return to nature (herbal tinctures, patterned frocks), and dark academia, a riff on Goth culture by way of Scottish boarding school (foreboding castles, heavy tweeds). Users mold and document their non-virtual lives in the image of these labels. The vibe moves from the Internet into the physical world and back again, a wavelength on the radar of our perceptions. (TikTok also serves up plenty of prompts to buy or shop; it’s not hard to imagine prepackaged kits sold on the platform to aspiring dark academics.)

Peli Grietzer, a young literary scholar who has theorized about social-media-era vibes, told me recently that “vibes-talk is becoming more and more a native language for us all.” He added a caveat: “Not sure which ‘we’ that is—maybe just the very online.” Exhausted by the Internet of personalities and expressed individuality, constantly measured and sorted by likes, we perhaps find comfort in turning our gaze outward. There is a self-effacement that takes place in embracing this new language, a sense that you are not “the main character” of a situation, as another TikTok meme might describe it, but a replaceable observer. “No thoughts, just vibes,” one online mantra goes, and after a year of constant anxiety it has a certain appeal. In a recent newsletter , the writer Mary Retta explained that she had been “vibing” throughout quarantine: “Not doing anything, and yet not doing nothing; refusing a schedule, ignoring your watch, but still filling days with intention, somehow.” Vibes can be an adjustment to circumstances, an almost defensive pursuit of harmony. “To vibe is to shape time into pleasure,” Retta wrote.

When I watch a morning-routine TikTok from “an herbalist and cook living in a Montana cabin,” I take in the mood of December sunlight, coffee in a ceramic mug, a vegetable rice bowl, tall pine forest, with a slowed-down Sufjan Stevens soundtrack —a nice creative-residency or hipster-pioneer vibe. After absorbing a dozen such videos at a stretch, I look up from my phone and my own apartment glows with that same kind of concentrated attention, as if I were seeing it in montage, too. The objects around me are lambent with significance. I can take in the vibe of my home office: hibiscus tree, hardwood desk, noise-cancelling headphones, sixties-jazz trio, to-go coffee cup. I suddenly feel a little more at home, as if the space belonged to me in a new way, or I had found my place within it as another element of the over-all vibe, playing my part. The vibes are all around us, for the taking. You don’t have to be a poet or philosopher, don’t even have to post anything online. All you have to do is notice.

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By William Finnegan

By Bill McKibben

By Evan Osnos

By Jennifer Wilson

What the debate over TikTok means for the future of social media

Subscribe to the center for technology innovation newsletter, mishaela robison and mishaela robison research assistant @mishaelarobison jack karsten jack karsten former senior research analyst, center for technology innovation - the brookings institution @jtkarsten.

October 12, 2020

It has been an eventful few months for TikTok: The social media platform recently won an injunction against a nationwide ban while it negotiates a deal with Oracle and Walmart to satisfy President Trump’s executive orders demanding a sale to a U.S. company. With the November deadline for a deal upcoming, the shifting contours of the transaction and concerns over the app’s security will have important ramifications for future technology policy.

The TikTok app has consistently topped worldwide download charts and recently celebrated the best quarter of downloads in app history. Yet this very popularity fueled concerns about data security and potential foreign espionage from China, where TikTok’s current parent company ByteDance is located. Though some TikTok users have speculated that the executive orders have been in retaliation to the platform’s role in organizing opposition to Trump’s reelection campaign , the app has been under national security review since 2019 due to its rising influence in the U.S., which suggests several overlapping motivations.

Other social media platforms have benefitted from the pandemonium surrounding TikTok’s current legal challenges, lessening the focus on their own products and services and attracting TikTok users. But the perceived political motivation to ban TikTok based on its Chinese origins sets a damaging precedent for other social media platforms balancing global ambitions with the U.S.’s broader handling of foreign relations.

Ties to China

Prior to issuing his executive order, Trump stated that he did not mind if “a very American company buys [TikTok.]” His sentiments were rooted in the administration’s growing distrust of Chinese technology companies. TikTok had previously attempted to allay the president’s concerns by storing Americans’ data on U.S. soil, hiring an American CEO, and employing lobbyists in Washington. Further, TikTok’s founder chose to create separate apps for the Chinese and global markets so that users around the world could avoid censorship requirements from the Chinese Communist Party. Still, efforts to assure the U.S. government that TikTok would not give data to the Chinese government have not been sufficient enough to quell concerns over Chinese influence and interference through the app.

Despite Trump’s initial demand that TikTok be acquired by an American company, the current deal proposal still allows ByteDance an 80% ownership stake in the newly established entity, TikTok Global, with 20% ownership from potential buyers Oracle and Walmart. It also remains unclear if such a proposal will be enough to eliminate other lingering concerns about the social media giant. Several lawmakers, including Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO,) criticized prior deals for not sufficiently severing ties with China. Trump himself has expressed similar sentiment in the past by vowing not to sign off if ByteDance maintains any organizational control. For now, American companies appear likely to acquire a minority of the social media giant with Trump’s “blessing” in spite of the majority control left to a company which has previously censored anti-China content on TikTok.

Reflected in both the president’s executive orders and his business guidance is the absence of coherent policy around Chinese technology, leaving TikTok as a precedent for future actions. Ongoing negotiations between TikTok and other companies signal a need for a comprehensive strategy for dealing with Chinese-based technology firms operating in the U.S. In March, similar scrutiny lead to the sale of the gay dating app Grindr after the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) determined that Chinese ownership of the app was a national security risk, though the Committee did not publicly share the evidence underlying that decision. Comparatively, the U.S. government has raised few concerns about data protection on the popular Swedish-based music app Spotify, despite major privacy concerns arising in Sweden. As questions of Chinese-owned tech companies continue to emerge, the U.S. government needs much clearer policies going forward to avoid making decisions an ad hoc manner.

Algorithmic transparency

By many accounts, TikTok’s power comes from its algorithm , which tailors an infinite feed of videos to each individual user’s preferences. As a result, the average TikTok user spends more time on the platform than its competitors. Recent trade restrictions by China have highlighted the value that the country places on the development of powerful algorithms.

Artificial intelligence can be a double-edged sword for social media, providing potential for increased engagement while creating echo chambers, bias, and manipulation. In light of these concerns, TikTok pledged to share their algorithm with external experts, a move that came days before the House Antitrust Hearing confronted Big Tech CEOs for their lack of transparency. In a blog post announcing this decision, former CEO Kevin Mayer called on other social media companies to do the same, emphasizing TikTok’s commitment to accountability. Mayer vowed to use TikTok’s time in the spotlight to “drive deeper conversations around algorithms, transparency, and content moderation, and to develop stricter rules of the road.”

TikTok’s openness may set a new benchmark for other social media companies, challenging them to be more transparent about their algorithms or risk losing trust. Though experts have debated the degree to which algorithms should be made transparent, research from the Stanford Department of Communication found that users trust algorithms more when presented with at least some information on how they work. These factors point to a need for algorithmic transparency, and the urgency of policy to enforce it.

Privacy enhancements

When asked about a potential Microsoft acquisition, co-founder Bill Gates described “being big in the social media business” as “a poison chalice” due to questions of encryption and privacy. Similarly, implicit in concerns that China may have access to TikTok users’ data are questions about data security and privacy. TikTok has previously faced criticism—and a lawsuit —for failing to protect the data privacy of minors, resulting in heightened privacy measures that they have only partially implemented.

Though, as a viral TikTok video pointed out, Facebook currently tracks more user data than TikTok, despite the latter engaging in concerning several data acquisition tactics . Since the ban was announced, major employers such as Wells Fargo and the federal government , and the Biden campaign have prohibited their staff from using the app due to security concerns. If ByteDance retains any part of U.S. operations, they could still be required to send data to Chinese companies under the country’s national security law. In the past, critics have also accused Oracle of selling personal user data , which suggests a need for greater privacy regulation for all companies in the United States, regardless of national origin.

Vanessa Pappas, TikTok’s new global head, has said her primary focus will be the app’s creators and users . If that is the case, she must first address the security of their data and institute appropriate privacy mechanisms.

TikTok exemplifies the necessity for comprehensive policies regarding foreign tech companies. While the fate of the imminent deal remains ambiguous, the tech world will be watching to determine if the company’s partnership with Oracle and Walmart can ameliorate the concerns that prompted calls for its removal from app stores. Reflexive condemnation of Chinese-based technology companies without a systematic policy basis is likely to prove ineffective and confusing in the long run. The current policy ambiguity misses an opportunity to pursue greater transparency and accountability from all technology companies.

No matter the ultimate outcome, TikTok has left an indelible mark on the social media industry. The questions raised by recent action are not new and illuminate gaps in policy which concern the future of the entire tech sector.

Facebook is a general, unrestricted donor to the Brookings Institution. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions posted in this piece are solely those of the author and not influenced by any donation.

Related Content

Darrell M. West, Nicol Turner Lee, Tom Wheeler

September 17, 2020

Geoffrey Gertz

August 7, 2020

November 15, 2019

Cybersecurity Internet & Telecommunications Privacy

Governance Studies

Center for Technology Innovation

Tom Wheeler

June 24, 2024

Diana Fu, Emile Dirks

The Brookings Institution, Washington DC

10:00 am - 12:00 pm EDT

Kyle Chayka Industries

Essay: How do you describe TikTok?

The automatic culture of the world's favorite new social network..

Hi! This is a 3,400-word essay about a technology that was totally new to me as of a few weeks ago. You can click the headline to read it in your browser. It’s a total experiment, so please let me know what you think.

This newsletter is a running series of essays on algorithmic culture and work updates from me, Kyle Chayka . Subscribe here .

For someone who writes about technology, I’m not really an early adopter. I don’t use virtual-reality goggles or participate in Twitch streams. Like everyone on the internet, I heard a lot about TikTok — teens! short videos! “ hype houses ”! — but for a long time I didn’t think I needed to try it out. How would another social network fit into my life? Don’t Twitter and Instagram cover my professional and personal needs at this point? (Snapchat I skipped over entirely.) What could TikTok, which serves an infinite stream of sub-60-second video clips, add, especially if I don’t care about meme-dances, which seemed to be its main purpose? 

Then, out of some combination of boredom and curiosity, like everything else these days, I downloaded the app. What I found is that you don’t just try TikTok; you immerse yourself in it. You sink into its depths like a 19th-century diver in a diving bell. More than any other social network since MySpace it feels like a new experience, the emergence of a different kind of technology and a different mode of consuming media. In this essay I want to try to describe that experience, without any news hooks, experts, theory, or data — just a personal encounter. 

The literary term “ ekphrasis ” usually refers to a detailed description of a piece of visual art in a text, translating it (in a sense) into words. Lately I’ve been thinking about ekphrasis of technology and media: How do you communicate what using or viewing something is like? Some of my favorite writing might fall into this vein. Junichiro Tanizaki’s 1933 essay “ In Praise of Shadows ” narrates the Japanese encounter with Western technology like electric lights and porcelain toilets. Walter Benjamin’s 1936 “ The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction ” shows how the rise of photography changed how people looked at visual art. By describing such experiences as exactly as possible, these essays become valuable artifacts in their own right, documenting historic shifts in human perception that happened as a result of tools we invented. 

We can’t return to the headspace of buildings without electric lights or a time when photography was scarce instead of omnipresent, but the texts allow us a glimpse. So this is my experiment: an ekphrasis of TikTok, while it’s still fresh.  

When you begin your TikTok journey, you are not faced with a choice of accounts to follow. Where Twitter and Instagram ask you to build your list yourself (the former more than the latter) TikTok simply launches you into the waterfall of content. You can check a few boxes as to which subjects you’re interested in — food, crafts, video games, travel — or not. Then there is the main feed, labeled “For You,” an evocation of customization and personal intimacy. Videos start playing, each clip looping until you make it stop. You might start seeing, as I did, minute-long clips of: 

— Gravestones being scraped down

— Wax being melted to seal letters

— An animated role-playing game

— Firefighters making shepherds pie 

— Tours of luxury apartments

— Students playing pranks on their teachers

— Dogs and cats doing funny things

The videos are flashes of narrative, many arduously constructed and edited, each self-contained but linked to the next by the shape of the container, the iPhone screen and the app feed. It’s like watching a montage of movie trailers, each crafted to addict your eye and ear, but with each new clip you have to begin constructing the story over again. Will the cat do something funny? Will the couple break up? Will this guy chug five beers? Or it’s like the flickering nonsense of images and text as a film spool runs out . 

The mechanism to navigate the TikTok feed is your thumb swiping, like a gondolier’s paddle, up to move forward to new content, down to go back to what you’ve already seen. This one interaction is enough to allow For You to get to know your content preferences. You either watch a video to completion and then maybe like or share it, or you skip it and move on to the next. 

The true pilot of the feed, however, is not the user but the recommendation algorithm, the equation that decides which video gets served to you next. More than any other social network, TikTok’s core product is its algorithm. We complain about being served bad Twitter ads or Instagram not showing us friends’ accounts, as if they’ve suddenly stopped existing, but it’s harder to fault the TikTok algorithm if only because it’s so much better at delivering a varied stream of content than its predecessors. 

A Spotify autoplay station, for example, most often follows the line of an artist or genre, serving relatively similar content over and over again. But TikTok recognizes that contrast is just as important as similarity to maintain our interest. It creates a shifting feed of topics and formats that actually feels personal, the way my Twitter feed, built up over more than a decade, feels like a reflection of my self. 

But I know who I follow on Twitter; they are voices I’ve chosen to incorporate into my feed. On TikTok, I never know where something’s coming from or why, only if I like it. There is no context. If Twitter is all about provenance — trusted people signing off on each other’s content, retweeting endorsements — TikTok is simply about the end result. Each video is evaluated on its own merits, one at a time. 

You can feel the For You feed trying subjects out on you. Dogs? Yes. Cats? Not so much. Rural Chinese fishing? Sure. Scooter tricks? No. Skateboarding? Yes. Fingerpicked guitar outside a cabin? Duh. And through the process of trial and error you get an assortment of videos that are on their own niche but put together resemble something like individual taste . It’s a mix as quirky as your own personal interests usually feel to you, though the fact that all of this content already exists on the platform gradually undercuts the sense of uniqueness: If many other people besides you didn’t also like it, it wouldn’t be there. 

A like count appears on the right side of each video, reassuring you that 6,000 other people have also enjoyed this clip enough to hit the button. Usually, the higher number does signify a better video, unlike tweets, for which the opposite is usually true. You can click into a comment section on each TikTok, too, which feel like YouTube comment sections: people jockeying to write the best riff or joke, bonus content after you watch the clip. There are no time stamps on the main feed. Unlike other social networks, it’s intentionally difficult to figure out when a TikTok video was originally posted, and many accounts repost popular videos anyway. This lends the feed an atmosphere of eternal present: It’s easy to imagine that everything you’re watching is happening right now , a gripping quality that makes it even harder to stop watching. 

Over the time I’ve been on TikTok the content of my feed has moved through phases. I can’t be sure how much the shifts are baked in to the system and how much they are a result of me engaging with different content (I’m not reporting on the structure of the algorithm here, just spelunking). There was a heavy skateboarding phase at first, but the mix has evolved into cooking lessons, clips of learning Chinese, home construction tips from This Old House, art-making close-ups, and early 2000s video games. If you search for a particular hashtag, hit like on a few videos, or follow an account, the For You algorithm tweaks your feed, adding in a bit more of that type of content. 

(A note on content mixture: “The mix” is famously how Tina Brown described the combination of different kinds of stories in Vanity Fair when she was the magazine’s very successful editor-in-chief in the ‘80s. Brown’s mix was hard-hitting news, fluffy celebrity profiles, glamorous fashion shoots, and smart critical commentary, all combined into one magazine. TikTok automates the mix of all these topics, going farther than any other platform to mimic the human editor.)

A sense emerges of teaching the algorithm what you like, bearing with it through periods of irrelevance and engaging in a way that shapes your feed. I barely look at the tab that shows me videos from people I actually follow, but I still follow them to make them show up more often in my For You feed. The process inspires patience and empathy, the way building a piece of IKEA furniture makes you like it more . It’s easy to get mad at Twitter because its algorithmic intrusions are so obvious; it’s harder with TikTok when the algorithm is all there is. The feed is a seamless environment that the user is meant to stay within. 

I didn’t tell TikTok I was interested in sensory deprivation tanks, but through some combination of randomness, metrics, and triangulation of my interests based on what else I engaged with, the app delivered a single video from a float spa and I immediately followed the account. Such specific genres of content are available elsewhere on the internet — I could follow a sensory deprivation YouTube channel or Instagram account — but the TikTok feed centralizes them and titrates the niche topic into my feed as often as I might want to see it, maybe one out of a hundred videos. After all, one video doesn’t mean I want dozens more of the same kind, as the YouTube algorithm seems to think. 

Before the 2010s we used to watch cable television, sitting on the couch with the remote pointed actively at the screen. If the show on one channel was boring, we changed it. If everything was boring, we engaged in an activity called channel flipping, switching continuously one to the next until something caught our eye. (On-demand streaming means we now flip through thumbnails more than channels; platform-flipping is the new channel-flipping.) TikTok is an eternal channel flip, and the flip is the point: there is no settled point of interest to land on. Nothing is meant to sustain your attention, even for cable TV’s traditional 10 minutes between commercial breaks. 

Like cable television, the viewer does not select the content on TikTok, only whether they want to watch it at that moment or not. It’s a marked contrast to how, in the past decade, social media platforms marketed themselves as offering user agency: you could follow anything or anyone you want, breaking traditional media’s hold on audiences. Instead, TikTok’s For You offers the passivity of linear cable TV with the addition of automated, customized variety and without the need for human editors to curate content or much action from the user to choose it. (Passivity is a feature; Netflix just announced that it’s exploring a version of linear TV .) Like Facebook , and unlike streaming, TikTok also claims to offload the risk of being an actual publisher: the content is all user-generated. Thus it’s both cheap and infinite.

The passivity induces a hypnotized flow state in the user. You don’t have to think, only react. The content often reinforces this thoughtlessness. It’s ephemera, fragments of the human mundane; Rube Goldberg machines are very popular. Sure, you can learn about food or news, but the most essentially TikTok thing I’ve seen in the past few days is a video of a young man who took a giant ball he made of beige rubber bands to an abandoned industrial site and bounced it around, off ledges and down cement steps, in the violet haze of early dusk. The clip is calm and quiet but also surreal, like a piece of video art you might watch for 15 minutes in a gallery. It has no symbolism, no story arc, only a pleasant absence of meaning and the brain-tickling pleasure of the ball gently squishing when it hits a surface, like an alien exploring the earth, unaccustomed to gravity. 

I’m biased in favor of such ambient content, which is probably why I get so much of it. But numb immersion — like a sensory deprivation tank — seems to be the point of the platform. On Twitter we get breaking news; on Instagram we see our friends and go shopping; on Facebook we (not me personally) join groups and share memes. On TikTok we are simply entertained. This is not to discount it as a very real force for politics, activism, and the business of culture, or a vehicle to create content and join in conversations. But for users, pure consumption is encouraged. The best bodily position in which to watch TikTok is supine, muscles slack, phone above your face like it’s an endless tunnel into the air. 

Sometimes a TikTok binge — short and intense until you get sick of it, like a salvia trip — has the feeling of a game. You keep flipping to the next video as if in search of some goal, though there are only ever more videos. You want to come to an end, though there is no such thing. This stumbling process is why users describe encountering a new subject matter as “finding [topic] TikTok,” like Cooking TikTok or Tiny House TikTok or Carpentry TikTok. There’s a sense of discovery because you wouldn’t necessarily know how to get there otherwise, only through the munificence of the algorithm. A limiting of possibilities is recast as a kind of magic. 

What is the theory of media that TikTok injects into the world? What are the new aesthetic standards that it will set as it becomes even more popular, beyond its current 850 million active users? It seems to combine Tumblr-style tribal niches with the brevity and intimacy of Instagram stories and the scalability of YouTube, where mainstream fame is most possible. The startup Quibi received billions of dollars of investment to bet on short-form video watched on phones. The company shut down within eight months of launch, but it wasn’t wrong about the format; it just produced terrible content (see my review of the service for Frieze ). TikTok is compelling because it’s so wide, a social network with the userbase of Facebook but fully multimedia, with the kinds of expensive-looking video editing and effects we’re used to on television. The platform presents media (or life itself?) as a permanent reality TV show, and you can tune in to any corner of it at any time.

TikTok isn’t limited to power users or a particular demographic (as in the case of the mutual addiction of Twitter and journalists), and that’s largely because of the adeptness of its algorithmic feed. There is no effort required to fine tune it, only time and swiping. Though the interface looks a little messy, it’s actually relatively simple, a quality that Instagram has abandoned under Facebook’s ownership in favor of cramming in every feature and format possible. (Where do we post what on there now — what’s a grid post, a story, or a reel, which are just Instagram’s shitty TikTok clone?) In fact, just surfing TikTok feels vaguely creative, as if you move through the field of content with your mind alone. 

Even if you are only watching, you are a part of TikTok. Internet culture has always been interactive; part of the joy of Lolcats was that you could make your own, using the template as a tool for self-expression and inside jokes. In recent years that kind of creative self-expression via social media has fallen by the wayside in favor of retweets, shares, and likes, centralizing authority around a few influential accounts and pushing the emphasis toward brands (which buy ads and drive revenue) and consumerism. TikTok returns triumphantly to the lowbrow, the absurd, the unimportant. 

The culture that it perpetuates are memes and patterns, like the dance moves that users assign to specific clips of songs. Audio is a way to navigate the platform: You can browse all the videos made to a particular soundtrack, making it very potent for spreading music. Users also create reaction videos to other videos, showing a selfie shot next to the original clip. Everything is participatory, and the nature of the algorithm makes it so that a video from an unknown account can go as viral as easily as one from a famous account. (This is true of all social networks but particularly extreme on TikTok.) The singular TikTok is less important than the continued flow of the feed and the emergence of recognizable tropes of TikTok culture that get traded back and forth, like the “ I Ain’t Seen Two Pretty Best Friends ” meme. The game is to interpolate that phrase into a video, sometimes into an otherwise straight-faced script: the surprise of the meme line, which is more absurdist symbol than meaningful language, tips you to the fact that it’s a joke. 

In his aforementioned essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” Walter Benjamin wrote that “aura” was contained in the physical presence of a unique work of art; it induced a special feeling that wasn’t captured by the reproducible photograph. By now we’ve long accepted that photographs can be art, too; even if they’re reproductions, they still maintain an aura. The evolution that I’m grasping for here — having started this paragraph over many times — is that now, in our age of the reproducibility of anything, the meaning of the discrete work of art itself has weakened. The aura is not contained within a single specific image, video, or physical object but a pattern that can be repeated by anyone without cheapening its power — in fact, the more it’s repeated, the more its impact increases. The unit of culture is the meme, its original author or artist less important than its primary specimens, which circulate endlessly, inspiring new riffs and offshoots. TikTok operates on and embraces this principle. 

Could it be that we’re encouraged to assign some authorship to the algorithm itself, as the prime actor of the platform? After all it’s the equation that’s bringing us this smooth, entrancing feed, that’s encouraging creators to create and consumers to consume. I don’t think that’s true, though, or at least not yet. We have to remember that the algorithm is also the work of its human creators at Bytedance in China, who have in the past been directed to “suppress posts created by users deemed too ugly, poor, or disabled for the platform” as well as censor political speech, according to The Intercept . Recommendation algorithms can be tools of soft censorship, subtly shaping a feed to be as glossy, appealing, and homogenous as possible rather than the truest reflection of either reality or a user’s desires. In Hollywood, a producer tells you if you’re not hot enough to be an actor; on TikTok, the algorithm lets you know if you don’t fit the mold. 

As it is, TikTok molds what and how I consume more than what I want to create. I feel no drive to make a TikTok video, maybe because the platform’s demographic is younger than I am and it still requires more video editing than I can handle, though it can also algorithmically crop video clips to moments of action. But when I switch over to Instagram and watch the automatic flip of stories from my friends and various brands, it suddenly feels boring and dead, like going from color TV back to black and white. I don’t want to only get content from people I follow; I want the full breadth of the platform, perfectly filtered. The grid of miscellany of Instagram’s discover tab doesn’t stand up to TikTok’s total immersion. 

TikTok’s feed is finely tuned and personalized, but I think what’s more important is how it automates the entire experience of online consumption. You don’t have to decide what you’re interested in; you just surrender to the platform. Automation gets disguised as customization. That makes the structure and priorities of the algorithm even more important as it increasingly determines what we watch, read, and hear, and what people are incentivized to create in digital spaces to get attention. And TikTok absolutely wants all of your attention. It’s not about casual browsing, not glancing at Twitter to see the latest news or checking your friend’s Instagram profile for updates. It’s a move directly toward an addiction that will be incredibly profitable for the company. And the more we trust that algorithmic feed, the easier it will be for the app to exploit its audiences.

This was an interesting experiment to write because I had no formal constraints from an external publication and of course no editing or feedback before publishing it. I wrote it just to document an obsession, and as with many obsessions, it’s fading a bit as I write it all out. At this point I’ve documented all the thoughts I have currently, in a fairly loose way. 

I would really like messages about this piece! Did it work, did it not work? Is this productive or not? There are more essays I’d like to write like this, without the pressure to fully compel public readers. But its main utility is to share ideas and start conversations, so it needs to accomplish at least that. 

Please comment, email me by replying, tweet about this, post it on your LinkedIn, or whatever platform you choose. Make a TikTok reaction video.

If you like this piece, please hit the heart button below! It helps me reach more readers on Substack. Email me at [email protected] or reply. Also:

— Follow me on  Twitter

— Buy my book on minimalism,  The Longing for Less

— Read more of my writing:  kylechayka.com

Ready for more?

The Grim Reality of Banning TikTok

T he U.S. government, once again, wants to ban TikTok. The app has become an incontrovertible force on American phones since it launched in 2016, defining the sounds and sights of pandemic-era culture. TikTok’s burst on the scene also represented a first for American consumers, and officials—a popular social media app that wasn’t started on Silicon Valley soil, but in China.

On March 13, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to force TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell TikTok or else the app will be banned on American phones. The government will fine the two major mobile app stores and any cloud hosting companies to ensure that Americans cannot access the app.

While fashioned as a forced divestiture on national security grounds, let’s be real: This is a ban. The intent has always been to ban TikTok, to punish it and its users without solving any of the underlying data privacy issues lawmakers claim to care about. Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw said it outright : “No one is trying to disguise anything… We want to ban TikTok.”

But, as such, a ban of TikTok would eliminate an important place for Americans to speak and be heard. It would be a travesty for the free speech rights of hundreds of millions of Americans who depend on the app to communicate, express themselves, and even make a living. And perhaps more importantly, it would further balkanize the global internet and disconnect us from the world.

Read more: What to Know About the Bill That Could Get TikTok Banned in the U.S.

This isn’t the first time the government has tried to ban TikTok: In 2021, former President Donald Trump issued an executive order that was halted in federal court when a Trump-appointed judge found it was “arbitrary and capricious” because it failed to consider other means of dealing with the problem. Another judge found that the national security threat posted by TikTok was “phrased in the hypothetical.” When the state of Montana tried to ban the app in 2023, a federal judge found it “oversteps state power and infringes on the constitutional rights of users,” with a “pervasive undertone of anti-Chinese sentiment.”

Trump also opened a national security review with the power to force a divestment, something Biden has continued to this day with no resolution; and last year, lawmakers looked poised to pass a bill banning TikTok, but lost steam after a high-profile grilling of its top executive. (Trump has done an about-face on the issue and recently warned that banning TikTok will only help its U.S. rivals like Meta.)

TikTok stands accused of being a conduit for the Chinese Communist Party, guzzling up sensitive user data and sending it to China. There’s not much evidence to suggest that’s true, except that their parent company ByteDance is a Chinese company, and China’s government has its so-called private sector in a chokehold. In order to stay compliant, you have to play nice.

In all of this, it’s important to remember that America is not China. America doesn't have a Great Firewall with our very own internet free from outside influences. America allows all sorts of websites that the government likes, dislikes, and fears onto our computers. So there’s an irony in allowing Chinese internet giants onto America’s internet when, of course, American companies like Google and Meta’s services aren’t allowed on Chinese computers.

And because of America’s robust speech protections under the First Amendment, the U.S. finds itself playing a different ballgame than the Chinese government in this moment. These rights protect Americans against the U.S. government, not from corporations like TikTok, Meta, YouTube, or Twitter, despite the fact that they do have outsized influence over modern communication. No, the First Amendment says that the government cannot stop you from speaking without a damned good reason. In other words, you’re protected against Congress—not TikTok.

The clearest problem with a TikTok ban is it would immediately wipe out a platform where 170 million Americans broadcast their views and receive information—sometimes about political happenings. In an era of mass polarization, shutting off the app would mean shutting down the ways in which millions of people—even those with unpopular views—speak out on issues they care about. The other problem is that Americans have the constitutional right to access all sorts of information—even if it’s deemed to be foreign propaganda. There’s been little evidence to suggest that ByteDance is influencing the flow of content at the behest of the Chinese government, though there’s some reports that are indeed worrying, including reports that TikTok censored videos related to the Tiananmen Square massacre, Tibetan independence, and the banned group Falun Gong.

Still, the Supreme Court ruled in 1964 that Americans have the right to receive what the government deems to be foreign propaganda. In Lamont v. Postmaster General , for instance, the Court ruled that the government couldn’t halt the flow of Soviet propaganda through the mail. The Court essentially said that the act of the government stepping in and banning propaganda would be akin to censorship, and the American people need to be free to evaluate these transgressive ideas for themselves.

Further, the government has repeatedly failed to pass any federal data privacy protections that would address the supposed underlying problem of TikTok gobbling up troves of U.S. user data and handing it to a Chinese parent company. Biden only made moves in February 2024 to prevent data brokers from selling U.S. user data to foreign adversaries like China, arguably a problem much bigger than one app. But the reality is that the government has long been more interested in banning a media company than dealing with a real public policy issue.

There is legitimate concern in Washington and elsewhere that it’s not the government that controls so much of America’s speech, but private companies like those bred in Silicon Valley. But the disappearance of TikTok would further empower media monopolists like Google and Meta, who already control about half of all U.S. digital ad dollars, and give them a tighter choke hold over our communication. There’s already a paucity of platforms where people speak; removing TikTok would eliminate one of the most important alternatives we have.

Since it launched in 2016, TikTok has been the most influential social media app in the world, not because it affects public policy or necessarily creates monoculture—neither are particularly true, in fact—but because it has given people a totally different way to spend time online. In doing so, it disrupted the monopolies of American tech companies like Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, and forced every rival to in some way mimic its signature style. There’s Facebook and Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, Snapchat Spotlight, and every other app seems to be an infinitely-scrolling video these days.

Still, Americans choose to use TikTok and their conversations will not easily port over to another platform in the event of it being banned. Instead, cutting through the connective tissue of the app will sever important ways that Americans—especially young Americans—are speaking at a time when those conversations are as rich as ever.

The reality is that if Congress wanted to solve our data privacy problems, they would solve our data privacy problems. But instead, they want to ban TikTok, so they’ve found a way to try and do so. The bill will proceed to the Senate floor, then to the president’s desk, and then it will land in the U.S. court system. At that point, our First Amendment will once again be put to the test—a free speech case that’s very much not in the abstract, but one whose results will affect 170 million Americans who just want to use an app and have their voices be heard.

More Must-Reads from TIME

• Melinda French Gates Is Going It Alone
• How to Buy Groceries Without Breaking the Bank
• Lai Ching-te Is Standing His Ground
• How to Cool Your Body Down Fast
• Forget Having It All . Let’s Try Having Enough
• 4 Signs Your Body Needs a Break
• The 15 Best Movies to Watch on a Plane
• Want Weekly Recs on What to Watch, Read, and More? Sign Up for Worth Your Time

Contact us at [email protected]

A Uses and Gratifications Exploratory Study of TikTok: What Does This Mean for Brands?

• December 2020
• Thesis for: MSc Marketing

• The University of Edinburgh

Abstract and Figures

Discover the world's research

• 25+ million members
• 160+ million publication pages
• 2.3+ billion citations
• Dr. George Cremona

• Karoline Cruzado Bautista
• Victor Omar Vite-León
• Christiana Poggi-Parodi
• سالي ماهر نصار
• Inform Tech People

• Sophie Elizabeth McCormack

• Baines Paul
• Rosengren Sara
• Antonetti Paolo

• Gareth Morgan

• Alberto Vega
• Tae Rang Choi

• COMPUT HUM BEHAV

• Mitchell Hamilton
• Velitchka D. Kaltcheva

• J Consum Market
• Recruit researchers
• Join for free
• Login Email Tip: Most researchers use their institutional email address as their ResearchGate login Password Forgot password? Keep me logged in Log in or Continue with Google Welcome back! Please log in. Email · Hint Tip: Most researchers use their institutional email address as their ResearchGate login Password Forgot password? Keep me logged in Log in or Continue with Google No account? Sign up

• Craft and Criticism
• Fiction and Poetry
• News and Culture
• Lit Hub Radio
• Reading Lists

• Literary Criticism
• Craft and Advice
• In Conversation
• On Translation
• Short Story
• From the Novel
• Bookstores and Libraries
• Film and TV
• Art and Photography
• Freeman’s
• The Virtual Book Channel
• Behind the Mic
• Beyond the Page
• The Cosmic Library
• The Critic and Her Publics
• Emergence Magazine
• Fiction/Non/Fiction
• First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing
• The History of Literature
• I’m a Writer But
• Lit Century
• Tor Presents: Voyage Into Genre
• Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast
• Write-minded
• The Best of the Decade
• Best Reviewed Books
• BookMarks Daily Giveaway
• The Daily Thrill
• CrimeReads Daily Giveaway

BookTok is Good, Actually: On the Undersung Joys of a Vast and Multifarious Platform

Leigh stein wonders why more book people don’t embrace the publishing juggernaut.

Shallow , fake, showy, and performative —these are a few of the adjectives used to describe BookTok, the corner of TikTok where young women share and discuss books on camera, by drive-by tourists to a culture they don’t understand.

I’m no BookTok tourist. I’ve lived here for nine months . As a chronically online millennial, I’ve become a translator between the readers on BookTok and the literary community that looks down upon them. On TikTok, I post a video about Mary Ruefle that gets forty thousand views and yields comments like: “this just gave a whole new perspective on my entire existence.”

In a banquet room in South Carolina, I’m giving the keynote speech at a writing conference. To inspire the audience, I tell the Cinderella story of Colleen Hoover, the bestselling author in America. Three days before my speech, her novel It Starts with Us sold 800,000 copies on release day. There are 120 writers in the room; only one has heard of Hoover.

It’s a little lonely over here. I’ve been baffled by why my esteemed colleagues, who gather in the thousands at AWP to kvetch about how hard it is to make a living as a writer, are so incurious about the place on the internet where readers are buying a metric fuckton of books.

Because it’s the “same 20 books over and over,” bestselling novelist Stephanie Danler sighs in Bustle , in a piece about her failed attempt to become a popular girl on BookTok.

“There was just something about watching the same twenty books being flaunted again and again,” former BookTuber Barry Pierce moans in GQ .

When I ask Satoria Ray , a 26-year-old creator, how she would respond to the claim that BookTok only flaunts the same twenty books, she says, “I would say that’s someone who has probably been on BookTok for a day.”

We’re on the fourth floor of the Union Square Barnes & Noble in Manhattan for their first-ever BookTok Festival. Tickets to the event sold out in two days. Ray is waiting patiently in line with at least fifty other women, who queued up before 10 AM to get first access to the tables where publishers including Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Sourcebooks are giving away swag and coveted advance reader copies. Some fans have brought rolling suitcases for the haul.

“I don’t think that any of us in this room are on the same BookTok,” Ray tells me.

Although the Barnes & Noble event caters to fans of romance and fantasy, BookTok is vast and multifarious. The community is a constellation of fandoms. There are fandoms around authors (Ottessa Moshfegh, Sally Rooney, Elif Batuman); identity tags (Sapphic lit; Black romance); feelings (saddest books I’ve ever read); vibes (dark academia; dark romance). For every bestselling BookTok title, you can find a hundred videos from creators telling you it’s overhyped—and recommending something else to read instead.

The hype, and the backlash to that hype, have helped to make BookTok into the most powerful word-of-mouth engine the book publishing industry has ever seen. According to Publishers Lunch, the top 90 BookTok authors saw their cumulative sales go from nine million units in 2020 to 20 million in 2021. Overall, 2022 print book sales were slightly down from 2021, but are still ahead of 2019; adult fiction sales in 2022 outperformed every other category.

By 10:30 AM, twenty-two-year-old Molly Mathes is sitting on the floor, inside a walled garden she’s built of tote bags stuffed with ARCs.

“I didn’t even realize we got free books,” she confesses. “I just came to see the panel.”

“What’s the best ARC you got?”

“ Yellowface by R.F. Kuang.” This satirical thriller, about diversity and cultural appropriation in the publishing industry, doesn’t come out until May 16.

Mathes lives in Albany, three hours away. In between graduating college and starting her first full-time job, BookTok made her a voracious reader. This is the first book event she’s ever attended.

“So what time did you get on the train this morning?”

While outsiders perceive BookTok as a contraction or reduction of books and ideas to what “performs” best in a visual medium engineered by Chinese geniuses to destroy our attention spans, fans tell me that being on BookTok has expanded their horizons as readers.

Elvir Belardi , a college senior with 30,000 followers on TikTok, describes the BookTok community as “a place to learn new things and expand your reading tastes.” The audio and visual trends, or memes, that may appear derivative and repetitive to newcomers to the platform actually “introduce you to a lot of new books and ideas.”

Belardi has spent the past two-and-a-half years creating content around books; when he graduates from college this spring, he plans to leverage his fluency in TikTok into a career in book publishing. Multiple literary agents have already shown interest in his work. Describing his success on TikTok, he sounds like a stunned lottery winner who can’t believe he picked the lucky number.

Madison Fairbanks, a sixty-something professional from Chicago, also credits BookTok with exposing her to a subgenre (dark romance) she wouldn’t have otherwise picked up. Because she reads between 250 and 350 romance novels each year, and travels to book events once a month, the appeal of the Barnes & Noble event was not the authors but the ARCs.

I arrive forty-five minutes early to the 2 PM romance panel with Tessa Bailey , Ana Huang , Kennedy Ryan , and Melissa Blair , moderated by the charismatic YA author Ryan La Sala ( he has 25,000 followers on TikTok ). Blair, an Anishinaabe-kwe of mixed ancestry, originally started creating content on BookTok to showcase indigenous authors. In December 2021, she self-published her first novel A Broken Blade anonymously and created a campaign around the launch that invited BookTok creators to solve the mystery: “ Unmask me if you can. ” The campaign went viral; Union Square picked up the series; the second title, A Shadow Crown , comes out in May.

Tessa Bailey, the author of 49 novels and five novellas (you can download a book checklist from her website to keep track), has been dubbed “the Michelangelo of dirty talk” by Entertainment Weekly.

La Sala asks her about the secret to writing steamy dialogue.

“When you’re in those moments, all the things that you are can be stripped away: your profession and what you are to your family…” Bailey explains. “And all you are in that moment is a vessel seeking pleasure. And I think that’s so sexy.”

A vessel seeking pleasure : as Bailey is speaking, I realize she could be describing every reader in this bookstore. She could be describing me. When we read fiction, we’re no longer our workplace nametags, our email addresses, the emergency contact number on the school form. Our lives are hard enough. Readers are vessels seeking pleasure.

“I love the comfort of having a happily ever after in the end,” Ana Huang, who writes steamy New Adult, says. “No matter how much angst, or how many dark times these characters go through, it always ends on a note of hope.”

It should come as no surprise that sales of romance novels exploded during the pandemic and show no sign of slowing down: romance was the bestselling genre of 2022, according to NPD BookScan, and print sales of romance were up 52.4% over 2021 (as reported in the 2/1/23 edition of Jane Friedman’s newsletter).

“Romance is the only genre where we as women are the absolute authority,” Kennedy Ryan, a former journalist who now writes romance novels threaded with social justice themes, says to a round of applause.

BookTok has become the gathering place for readers who know what they want. They aren’t seeking the approval of New Yorker subscribers—they have the same tote bag you do—and they aren’t apologizing for what they like.

In her book Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It , Kaitlyn Tiffany shines a light on the role young women have played through internet fandoms over the last 30 years. “Though early internet fandom was invite-only and near exclusive to well-paid white men,” she writes, “it was also the first evidence of a pattern. Fans became, almost as a rule, the first to adopt new platforms and to invent new features of the internet—a habit molded by the fact that they were the people with the most obvious incentive to do so.”

Referencing Nancy Kaplan and Eva Farrell’s 1994 ethnography of “young women on the net,” Tiffany writes that they found that teenage girls “had no professional reason to be online, and so it was only their ‘desires’ that brought them there.” In contrast to the men who were early adopters, girls were there to make connections, rather than share information.

I spent last summer studying abroad on BookTok, after I found out that My Year of Rest and Relaxation was one of the novels that became a viral sensation on the platform. I’d used this book as a comp for selling my own satire of girlboss excess and narcissism, Self Care , and I set to find the MYORAR fans and send them copies of my book. Then I started creating my own content. My first video to go viral was about the MYORAR fandom.

When I scroll TikTok, I see creativity, joy, pleasure, energy, and a contagious enthusiasm for books.

When I scroll past millennial and gen X writers on Twitter or Instagram, I see the symptoms of major depressive disorder: fatigue and feelings of worthlessness, irritability, lack of pleasure. More than see it—I feel it. I’m there.

Our careers have not turned out as expected. We thought we could model our paths to success after our idols—Joan Didion and Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison and Nora Ephron—by persevering, saying the thing others were unwilling to say, publishing books that mattered, hitting the Hollywood jackpot at least once . We thought if we stayed in the game long enough, we could have both prestige and an apartment big enough to throw dinner parties.

But the last twenty years of tech have fundamentally changed how authors (and other artists) make names for themselves and earn their livings. I’m thirty-eight years old and the secret to my success is that I don’t have any children: I can work seven days a week whenever I want to!

And now I’m telling you that you have to pay attention to TikTok?

For the writers who still haven’t received the life-changing book advance, or the TV series adaptation, or the tenure-track teaching job, or the award that comes with prize money, or the other forms of prestige and influence that could offer some compensation for feeling broke and unappreciated, maybe you can sleep at night because you tell yourself at least you have good taste. Standards. You know what literature is. Giving pleasure to readers is not on your to-do list. No happy endings. Your work is much more important. And that’s fine.

If you need me, I’ll be over here, playing in the fangirl kingdom.

• Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)

Leigh Stein

Previous article, next article, support lit hub..

Join our community of readers.

to the Lithub Daily

Popular posts.

Follow us on Twitter

Ann Beattie Wonders What Donald Barthelme Would Have Made of the Spy Balloon

• RSS - Posts

Literary Hub

Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature

Sign Up For Our Newsletters

How to Pitch Lit Hub

Advertisers: Contact Us

Privacy Policy

Support Lit Hub - Become A Member

Become a Lit Hub Supporting Member : Because Books Matter

For the past decade, Literary Hub has brought you the best of the book world for free—no paywall. But our future relies on you. In return for a donation, you’ll get an ad-free reading experience , exclusive editors’ picks, book giveaways, and our coveted Joan Didion Lit Hub tote bag . Most importantly, you’ll keep independent book coverage alive and thriving on the internet.

Become a member for as low as $5/month

A University of Chicago admissions department employee sent a TikToker a handwritten, illustrated note in response to a personal essay she wrote

• A TikToker went viral showing off a handwritten note she received from UChicago admissions.
• The letter came in reply to a personal essay she wrote about the meaning of "meep."
• She said she was inspired to say "meep" by the Muppet Beaker when she was a child.

A TikToker said she received a handwritten note from the University of Chicago's admissions department because of a personal essay she wrote, and viewers are obsessed.

For the essay, which the creator shared in her slideshow video , she was asked to "describe something vestigial," which refers to how some attributes or structures (like the human appendix) are retrained through evolution despite losing most or all of their original purpose.

The TikToker wrote about the word "meep," which she said she began saying when she was four years old, inspired by the orange-headed Muppet Beaker, who uttered meep as a catchphrase.

In her essay, she described how the gibberish phrase became a "somewhat vestigial presence" in her life as she kept saying it throughout her childhood and adolescence, despite leaving other kid tendencies behind. But she says it's not fully vestigial because it's still very useful to her.

She never fully defined her version of "meep," but she explained it as a kind of meaningless exclamation she makes in certain silly or stressful situations, like when she's surrounded by grumpy students during AP studying season.

"In these moments I know that there is no form of human expression—no word, no gesticulation, no fake cough, no interpretive dance—that could better capture the feeling I wish to convey than meep," she wrote.

Related stories

She went on to describe how she bonded with another girl in an AP Physics class who had a similar tic: saying "murp." She said the murper led her to probe the appeal of "meep" deeper, and she theorized that it's because saying this phrase appeals to a universal human desire to not think super hard sometimes, to just be like a child and "live by the rules of nonsense."

Insider reached out to the TikToker, @standout.search, for comment.

The handwritten note from Eloise Hyman, formerly UChicago associate director of admissions, congratulated her on being accepted into the class of 2022, and said she was "so glad" she decided to attend the school. The letter included an illustration of the muppet Beaker saying "Meep!"

"I really loved your extended essay on the vestigial meep — and hope you don't mind my attempt at drawing Beaker myself!" Hyman wrote.

In a comment emailed by UChicago, Hyman said UChicago college admissions sometimes sends a handwritten note to incoming students to welcome them.

"Our application essay prompts are a unique tradition that help us find those intellectually curious high schoolers who will thrive on campus," Hyman said. "The prompts allow for diverse ideas and perspectives to be represented, which the 'meep' essay demonstrates perfectly."

The video received over half a million views and was packed with comments saying this was the cutest thing they'd ever seen, and praising the TikToker's essay as the best they'd ever read. Responding to a comment, the creator said she spent months working on the essay.

"I usually cringe out at reading others' essays, including mine, but this one… this one hit the spot," one user said.

• Main content

Find anything you save across the site in your account

Why Men Are ‘Rawdogging’ Flights

By Kate Lindsay

Everyone has their own tricks for staving off boredom on a long-haul flight. Some people load up on podcast episodes, others power through the available in-flight entertainment. But no one simply sits, staring silently at the real-time flight map on the screen in front of them, for the entirety of a trip. Right? Wrong. A small group of hardy men—the gender that brought you frat hazing and Logan Paul—are now doing exactly that, and for a variety of surprisingly solid reasons.

A 26-year-old Londoner named West (who asked to use only his first name) went viral in May when he posted about his decision to forgo any entertainment and pass a seven-hour trip watching the flight map. “Anyone else bareback flights?” he asked in the caption.

The concept—referred to in a vivid and perhaps unfortunate parlance as “rawdogging,” “flying raw,” and “bareback”—resonated with many in the comments on West's TikTok page, @WestWasHere . “Yup, from London to Miami this week…pure bareback no food or water,” one wrote. “I swear barebacking flights make it go quicker,” another added.

“I've got DMs on Instagram like, ‘Bro, you need to teach us how to bareback flights,’” West tells GQ .

“I am a nervous flier and generally cannot focus on anything on a plane—movies, TV shows, books, articles, whatever—with any success,” says Luke Winkie, a 33-year-old staff writer at Slate, who has used the flight map as his only in-flight entertainment for years. “For some reason I don't like processing new information when I'm in the air. I want to stick to things that are predictable and safe.”

For West, who has since posted multiple videos from his raw flights (including his longest, a 21-hour slog from London to Perth, Australia), the practice simply resulted from how much he has to travel for his work in the music industry. “I got sick of watching the same movies,” he says. West likens flying raw to meditation. “Visually, you are kind of impaired. You only get to look at the seat in front of you, to your right or left if you're at the window. All you hear is that drumming sound of the engine. It's just white noise.”

But West and others have also come to see rawdogging flights as a kind of challenge, like the Tough Mudder or No Nut November, the goal being to see how fully participants can deprive themselves of creature comforts, up to and including free snack and drinks and even bathroom visits. A true rawdogger takes no indulgences.

West says that the women who have commented on his videos are usually doing so to express shock. Taking flights raw seems to be a “masculine thing,” he says. “Everything's about looking cool. Most guys embrace it as a joke or like, ‘We are so hard. David Goggins has nothing on us.’”

Winkie agrees. “I don't think men have the same ‘treat culture’ that women do, which is frankly a shame,” he says. “A long flight, for women, is the perfect venue to organize an entire itinerary of treats, and I do think men tend to be more stoic and weird about the spaces in which they allow themselves to receive pleasure.”

Still, West says that a recent trip from London from Bali (20 hours) taught him that there are benefits to rawdogging beyond its meditative nature. His best ideas, he says, have come from the time spent locked into the flight map, just thinking. “I'm there like, Oh, we're flying over Afghanistan. Oh, we're going at 36,000 feet instead of 37,” he says. “Or like, Oh, I think that's a good idea as a new series on my TikTok.” The experience left him refreshed. “When I saw my mom [upon landing], she was like, ‘You have so much energy,’” he recalls. “And I'm like, I feel fine. I feel recharged. I feel like I've been able to have time to myself.”

The last benefit may be the most significant: Everyone else leaves you alone. West recalls how a man who was seated next to him in a middle aisle opted to squeeze past two people on his other side rather than disturb West. “He must have been like, ‘I do not want to bother him right now,’” West says with a laugh. “‘He's locked into this altitude.’”

To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .

A Journey Along the Camino de Santiago, Spain’s Most Famous Pilgrimage Route

By Michaela Trimble

“ Tu mochila es tan pesada como tus miedos ,” says Leonardo San Sebastián, as he lifts the bottom of my backpack to check its weight. We’re standing before the Santuario de Santa María a Real do Cebreiro, an oval-shaped, thatched-roof church located in a mountaintop town that feels more likely to be in Ireland than in Galicia, an autonomous region in northwestern Spain. I enter the building and make an offering before lighting a candle within a red votive holder. I place it at the front of the church, near the altar, then take a seat in one of the old wooden pews to contemplate the last several days spent hiking the Camino de Santiago. I’ve walked over 100 miles, which has left my feet and legs tired and sore, but has given me hundreds of hours to be with myself and my thoughts amid rolling fields of poppy and wheat.

Guided by the experts of Mountain Travel Sobek , I’m walking the Camino Frances route of the Camino de Santiago, a network of paths that weaves through the South of France and nearly every stretch of Spain and leads to Santiago de Compostela. Though it’s a Catholic pilgrimage, I’m not participating in the walk for religious reasons. I’m here in the spiritual sense, a calling of curiosity to learn more about the world’s great pilgrimages and why people do them. I’ve had the opportunity to experience cultural rites of passages around the world, from walking parts of the Kumano Kodo in Japan with a practicing monk to participating in the Qoyllur Rit’i walk in Peru to celebrate the reappearance of the Pleiades constellation in the sky. I’m fascinated by the transformative power of a singular destination shared among many: when hundreds, even thousands, of people all have the same goal in mind, it creates a certain type of momentum—like magic. A desire to feel what that meant for people walking the Camino de Santiago drew me to this pilgrimage, as did my love for Spain.

Originally from the Basque Country, Leonardo is one of the three guides leading me along my two-week journey along the Camino Frances, one of the most popular routes of the Camino de Santiago. Given that my bags were already transported to the next hotel, he’s wondering what I have in my backpack that could weigh so much. I tell him a film camera, journal, and extra water are causing the weight, though I know what he really means. His question is deeper than my answer, and nods to the greater meaning of a journey like walking the Camino de Santiago: The more fear we have, the greater our load, whether alluding to the gear in a backpack or the fears and anxieties we hold as we move through life.

No matter which route travelers choose to take, they all end in Santiago de Compostela, where the trails come together at the town’s eponymous Romanesque cathedral, a structure completed in the early 1200s and believed to hold the tomb of the apostle St. James. When the tomb was purportedly discovered in the 9th century, the town and its cathedral became one of the most important Christian pilgrimage sites in Europe, leading to the creation of the Camino de Santiago. While each route has its unique history and heritage, the Camino Frances has been the most popular trail since the Middle Ages and is about 500 miles. It takes about five weeks to complete. Given that I only have a few weeks to spare, I’m hiking it in parts, totaling about a 125-mile journey on foot.

By Elise Taylor

By Emma Specter

By Lilah Ramzi

Beginning in St. Jean Pied de Port Camino Frances, a village on the French side of the Basque Pyrenees, I’ve already crossed from France into Spain and walked along the historical Pass of Roncesvalles, where the hero of the Charlemagne Army, Roland, battled against the Basques. I’ve crossed through the oak and beech forests of the Erro Valley, arriving in Pamplona before setting off for the 9th-century city of Burgos on the Rio Arlanzon. I’ve walked through central Spain, beyond seemingly endless fields of billowing wheat and poppies, to the city of Leon, home to one of the most famous Gothic-style cathedrals in Spain. I’ve walked down country roads lined with vineyards until crossing into Galicia for the final stretch of the journey.

Just a day away from reaching Santiago de Compostela, the lead guide of my trip, Erik Perez, tells me why he chose to dedicate his life to leading travelers along the Camino de Santiago. When he was 25, he was an avid mountain climber, until he had a fall that nearly left him paralyzed. During his three-month stay in the hospital, he began to form a unique view of the Virgin Mary, who was framed on the wall before his bed. He promised her he would dedicate his life to doing what he does today if she let him walk again. The walk he’s leading me on marks his 127 th journey.

“The Camino de Santiago is special that way. Many people do it at significant turning points in their lives: graduation, resignation, retirement,” says Erik. “Many pilgrims walk because their path forward is unclear. Through days of silence and time alone in nature, they eventually find their next step.”

Though the trail is a Catholic rite of passage, most people I meet aren’t walking for that reason alone, as Erik suggests. They, like me, are stepping out of one phase of life and entering another. One woman I met told me she talked to her late husband during her entire walk, feeling his spirit near her throughout her journey. Another pilgrim said he walked because, at 73, he didn’t know how much longer he would be able to do such an athletic feat. For me, I felt like I had a chance to process my last relationships. I hadn’t given myself much time between them, and I thought about my contribution to where things had gone wrong. At one point, during a water break at a mountaintop, I opened my journal to write. All that came out was, “I want something different.”

Walking the Camino de Santiago taught me many lessons. Each day is different. Sometimes it’s a pleasure to trip past undulating fields of wildflowers, and other times it’s a slog of rainy days where the path ahead is barely visible. But on the Camino as in life, I choose to keep walking. Even if the forecast calls for rain, it likely means there’s unknown beauty ahead—usually in the form of a rainbow smeared across the sky above a distant valley I’ve yet had the joy to know.

More Great Living Stories From Vogue

Meghan Markle Is Returning to Television

Is Art Deco Interior Design Roaring Back Into Style?

Kate Middleton and Prince William Share a Never-Before-Seen Wedding Picture

Sofia Richie Grainge Has GiveThe Prince and Princess of Wales Share a Never-Before-Seen Wedding Picturen Birth to Her First Child—And the Name Is…

The 10 Best Spas in the World

Never miss a Vogue moment and get unlimited digital access for just $2 $1 per month.

Vogue Daily

By signing up you agree to our User Agreement (including the class action waiver and arbitration provisions ), our Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement and to receive marketing and account-related emails from Vogue. You can unsubscribe at any time. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

• Share full article

If You Know What ‘Brainrot’ Means, You Might Already Have It

A popular term captures the condition of being terminally online, with humor and pathos.

Credit... Ohni Lisle

Supported by

By Jessica Roy

Jessica Roy is a writer based in Paris, where she moved at least in part to avoid brainrot after decades spent working in digital media.

• Published June 13, 2024 Updated June 17, 2024

If you or someone you love speaks almost exclusively in internet references — “It’s giving golden retriever boyfriend energy” or “Show it to me Rachel” — they may be suffering from a condition known as “brainrot.”

Listen to this article with reporter commentary

The term refers primarily to low-value internet content and the effects caused by spending too much time consuming it. Example: “I’ve been watching so many TikToks, I have brainrot.”

Online discussion of brainrot has recently grown so widespread that some social media users have begun creating parodies of people who seem to embody the condition.

Several videos by the TikTok user Heidi Becker show her facing the camera as she strings together one internet reference after another in rapid-fire fashion.

“Hiii, oh my god, the fit is fitting, pop off king!” she says at the start of a recent video that has over 200,000 likes.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .

Advertisement

• Ray Kurzweil on how AI will transform the physical world

The changes will be particularly profound in energy, manufacturing and medicine, says the futurist

B Y THE TIME children born today are in kindergarten, artificial intelligence ( AI ) will probably have surpassed humans at all cognitive tasks, from science to creativity. When I first predicted in 1999 that we would have such artificial general intelligence ( AGI ) by 2029, most experts thought I’d switched to writing fiction. But since the spectacular breakthroughs of the past few years, many experts think we will have AGI even sooner—so I’ve technically gone from being an optimist to a pessimist, without changing my prediction at all.

After working in the field for 61 years—longer than anyone else alive—I am gratified to see AI at the heart of global conversation. Yet most commentary misses how large language models like Chat GPT and Gemini fit into an even larger story. AI is about to make the leap from revolutionising just the digital world to transforming the physical world as well. This will bring countless benefits, but three areas have especially profound implications: energy, manufacturing and medicine.

Sources of energy are among civilisation’s most fundamental resources. For two centuries the world has needed dirty, non-renewable fossil fuels. Yet harvesting just 0.01% of the sunlight the Earth receives would cover all human energy consumption. Since 1975, solar cells have become 99.7% cheaper per watt of capacity, allowing worldwide capacity to increase by around 2m times. So why doesn’t solar energy dominate yet?

The problem is two-fold. First, photovoltaic materials remain too expensive and inefficient to replace coal and gas completely. Second, because solar generation varies on both diurnal (day/night) and annual (summer/winter) scales, huge amounts of energy need to be stored until needed—and today’s battery technology isn’t quite cost-effective enough. The laws of physics suggest that massive improvements are possible, but the range of chemical possibilities to explore is so enormous that scientists have made achingly slow progress.

By contrast, AI can rapidly sift through billions of chemistries in simulation, and is already driving innovations in both photovoltaics and batteries. This is poised to accelerate dramatically. In all of history until November 2023, humans had discovered about 20,000 stable inorganic compounds for use across all technologies. Then, Google’s GN o ME AI discovered far more, increasing that figure overnight to 421,000. Yet this barely scratches the surface of materials-science applications. Once vastly smarter AGI finds fully optimal materials, photovoltaic megaprojects will become viable and solar energy can be so abundant as to be almost free.

Energy abundance enables another revolution: in manufacturing. The costs of almost all goods—from food and clothing to electronics and cars—come largely from a few common factors such as energy, labour (including cognitive labour like R & D and design) and raw materials. AI is on course to vastly lower all these costs.

After cheap, abundant solar energy, the next component is human labour, which is often backbreaking and dangerous. AI is making big strides in robotics that can greatly reduce labour costs. Robotics will also reduce raw-material extraction costs, and AI is finding ways to replace expensive rare-earth elements with common ones like zirconium, silicon and carbon-based graphene. Together, this means that most kinds of goods will become amazingly cheap and abundant.

These advanced manufacturing capabilities will allow the price-performance of computing to maintain the exponential trajectory of the past century—a 75-quadrillion-fold improvement since 1939. This is due to a feedback loop: today’s cutting-edge AI chips are used to optimise designs for next-generation chips. In terms of calculations per second per constant dollar, the best hardware available last November could do 48bn. Nvidia’s new B 200 GPU s exceed 500bn.

As we build the titanic computing power needed to simulate biology, we’ll unlock the third physical revolution from AI : medicine. Despite 200 years of dramatic progress, our understanding of the human body is still built on messy approximations that are usually mostly right for most patients, but probably aren’t totally right for you . Tens of thousands of Americans a year die from reactions to drugs that studies said should help them.

Yet AI is starting to turn medicine into an exact science. Instead of painstaking trial-and-error in an experimental lab, molecular biosimulation—precise computer modelling that aids the study of the human body and how drugs work—can quickly assess billions of options to find the most promising medicines. Last summer the first drug designed end-to-end by AI entered phase-2 trials for treating idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a lung disease. Dozens of other AI -designed drugs are now entering trials.

Both the drug-discovery and trial pipelines will be supercharged as simulations incorporate the immensely richer data that AI makes possible. In all of history until 2022, science had determined the shapes of around 190,000 proteins. That year DeepMind’s AlphaFold 2 discovered over 200m, which have been released free of charge to researchers to help develop new treatments.

Much more laboratory research is needed to populate larger simulations accurately, but the roadmap is clear. Next, AI will simulate protein complexes, then organelles, cells, tissues, organs and—eventually—the whole body.

This will ultimately replace today’s clinical trials, which are expensive, risky, slow and statistically underpowered. Even in a phase-3 trial, there’s probably not one single subject who matches you on every relevant factor of genetics, lifestyle, comorbidities, drug interactions and disease variation.

Digital trials will let us tailor medicines to each individual patient. The potential is breathtaking: to cure not just diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s, but the harmful effects of ageing itself.

Today, scientific progress gives the average American or Briton an extra six to seven weeks of life expectancy each year. When AGI gives us full mastery over cellular biology, these gains will sharply accelerate. Once annual increases in life expectancy reach 12 months, we’ll achieve “longevity escape velocity”. For people diligent about healthy habits and using new therapies, I believe this will happen between 2029 and 2035—at which point ageing will not increase their annual chance of dying. And thanks to exponential price-performance improvement in computing, AI -driven therapies that are expensive at first will quickly become widely available.

This is AI ’s most transformative promise: longer, healthier lives unbounded by the scarcity and frailty that have limited humanity since its beginnings. ■

Ray Kurzweil is a computer scientist, inventor and the author of books including “The Age of Intelligent Machines” (1990), “The Age of Spiritual Machines” (1999) and “The Singularity is Near” (2005). His new book, “The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge with AI”, will be published on June 25th.

Explore more

By invitation june 22nd 2024, vladimir putin’s war against ukraine is part of his revolution against the west.

From the June 22nd 2024 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

More from By Invitation

Harriet Harman on how Parliament has changed over four decades

It is more in touch with voters, says the longest-serving female MP—but there is more work to do

He is leading Russia into a new phase of strategic confrontation, says Stephen Covington, a longtime NATO adviser

What good are whizzy new drugs if the world can’t afford them?

Bringing gene therapies and obesity drugs to the masses will require financial innovation too, says Steven Pearson

Why political centrists must rediscover their passion

They need to be clear about what opposing populism does and doesn’t mean, argues Yair Zivan

Digital finance is a money-launderer’s dream, argues an author

Curbing dirty money will require both governments and techies to be less dogmatic, says Geoff White

American business should not empower a criminal, says Reid Hoffman

No rational CEO would want a capricious strongman in the White House, argues the entrepreneur

You're reading a free article with opinions that may differ from The Motley Fool's Premium Investing Services. Become a Motley Fool member today to get instant access to our top analyst recommendations, in-depth research, investing resources, and more. Learn More

Chipotle's 50-for-1 Stock Split Is Coming. Here's What Investors Need to Know

• Chipotle will split its stock 50-for-1 on June 26.
• The company has seen incredible growth over the last few years that looks to be continuing.
• There is more to the story than might first appear.
• Motley Fool Issues Rare “All In” Buy Alert

Chipotle Mexican Grill

A historic stock split is coming for this fast-casual favorite.

High-profile stock splits are en vogue, it seems. Just days after Nvidia split its shares 10-for-1, Broadcom announced it would follow suit. In fact, several big names are choosing to split theirs this summer. After Nvidia's stock split, maybe the most anticipated is fast-casual restaurant pioneer Chipotle ( CMG 1.70% ) .

Shares of Nvidia are up about 10% since it executed the split on June 7. Can Chipotle investors expect a similar bump in stock price? Let's consider a few basics first.

Here's how Chipotle's split will work and what it might mean

A stock split , or more specifically a forward stock split, in this case, is when a company issues new stock to shareholders, increasing the number of shares on the market. The shares then begin trading at a lower price. It's done proportionately so that the total value of an investor's portfolio doesn't change.

So in the case of Chipotle's 50-for-1 split, each shareholder will be issued 49 additional shares for every share they own after the market closes on June 25. They now have 50 times the shares they had before. However, they aren't suddenly 50 times richer; rather, when markets open the next day, shares are 50 times cheaper than the day before.

So the move itself doesn't affect the value of a portfolio directly, but it can affect it down the line. Lowering the price removes a barrier to many retail investors to afford shares of the stock, allowing for more volume and money in the market. This certainly has the potential to positively affect the stock price, but not necessarily. Don't count on this as a guarantee that just because Nvidia's stock rose after the split, Chipotle's will rise too.

Besides, this is short-term thinking; don't get lost trying to time the market. Instead, focus on the value of the company long-term.

So is Chipotle a good long-term play? 

Chipotle is smoking its peers in growth

There are a lot of options in the quick-service restaurant (QSR) market. Chipotle has to compete with players like McDonald's and Yum! , the owner of chains like KFC and Taco Bell. Over the last few years, Chipotle has grown revenue at a seriously impressive pace. Look at the difference in this chart.

CMG Revenue (TTM) data by YCharts

And the strong growth has been consistent even through tough times in the larger market. In 2020, the year restaurants were hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, Chipotle still managed to grow revenues by more than 7%. McDonald's shrank revenue by more than 10% in the same year. Showing that it is resilient and agile in times of crisis is not something to take lightly; it speaks to the company's solid leadership.

This growth looks to be continuing. The company is expecting to raise its earnings per share (EPS) by about 53% for 2024 compared to 2023. That's about four times the growth McDonald's expects.

There are some reasons to be cautious

Chipotle certainly has a lot going for it, and its growth can't be denied. However, there are some aspects of the business that don't look quite as rosy. The incredible revenue growth has been largely driven by the expansion of locations. If you look at comparable-store sales, the company saw a 7% increase for Q1 2024, or about half the top-line growth for the same period.

Its stock is also valued significantly higher than McDonald's and Yum! in relation to its current earnings. Investors are counting on its growth to continue to justify the valuation. If this growth is disrupted or begins to cool off, suddenly that premium might not look so justified.

Even with this in mind, I still think Chipotle is a good bet over the long term. Keep an eye on that comparable-store growth, however. That's the number the company will need to be able to drive when it isn't opening so many stores.

Johnny Rice has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Chipotle Mexican Grill and Nvidia. The Motley Fool recommends Broadcom. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy .

Related Articles

Premium Investing Services

Invest better with The Motley Fool. Get stock recommendations, portfolio guidance, and more from The Motley Fool's premium services.