TikTok has gone up become most popular site on the internet has sparked endless discussions about its stickiness — as if it were capable hack our normal cognitive pathways and deliver messages straight to our brains. For the most part, critical analysis suggests that the platform’s effectiveness seems almighty algorithm. Technology critics like Eleanor Cummins and Rob Horninge.g. unpacking the ways users view the algorithm as a tool for self-discovery — the way it seems to “show you who you are,” ensure endorsement content it has delivered. Others have dissected the algorithm’s cultural appeal, arguing that it fills a gap in contemporary spiritual life by positioning itself as a data powered god that reads our swipes and likes just like the ancient gods did with our palms and stars. Overall, these analyzes show that misplaced trust in the algorithm is the main culprit behind our specific vulnerabilities to TikTok.
The focus so much on the algorithm — and the content it provides — led us to overlook a central part of TikTok’s operating logic: the phone. The failure to fully explore the role this device plays in TikTok’s delivery has led to an underestimation of how the platform works; After all, it is not simply content, but also the medium and context that informs how we receive information through a given channel.
For example, the transition from cinema to TV occurred in the mid-20th century and allowed moving images into our homes. Once confined to theaters, this content began to live with us — we watch it as we get ready in the morning, have dinner, receive guests, spend time with family. Theorists like Marshall McLuhan found that when motion pictures were taken out of the dark, anonymous communes of the theater and placed in our indoor spaces, the fundamental mechanism of how we received, processed and related to them has changed. As newly etched features of our abode — which Heidegger found seem to merge deeply with our sense of immersion in the world — they have a familiar idyllic air. Viewers increasingly develop “near-social” relationships with the people they see through these screens, as Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl have noted in foundation article in which they currency forwards. Home audiences increasingly see these mass media people as soul mates, giving broadcasters the means to engage audiences on a more personal level.
Just as our relationship with media changes when it enters our homes, it continues to change as it enters our smartphones. These devices, tightly integrated into the way we think and process information, have allowed TikTok to position itself as an extension of our minds. If we want to escape the grasp of the application, we must first understand how the mind works in the age of technology.
Once, the platforms are searched become a purveyor of universal, device-agnostic content accessible to anyone who might want to. Like Kyle Chayka Note, which allows companies to promise users that they can use any device to bypass characteristics such as nationality, identity, or caste and “track anything or anyone.” ” that they want while on the site. By Google mission “Organizing the world’s information and making it accessible to the world” is in many ways emblematic of this logic. Discussions rarely focus on the specifics of our encounters with these platforms — tools used, context, or materiality.
With TikTok, however, transcendence is exchanged for in-app immortality. Where Google wants to give you access to the world, TikTok promises to reveal your deepest desires. The interfaces of Youtube and Instagram are super-intermediate dashboards (with screens inside the screen and links that explode outside) that allow you to browse the sea of content, while TikTok’s is full screen. Diary your introspection without mediators.
