My Experience with TikTok

As a college student, I often feel slightly out of the loop without TikTok. The latest trends and Billboard hits take a couple of weeks to appear on my YouTube Shorts or Instagram Reels feeds. Frequently, my friends reference a trend or joke I have not yet seen, which creates a vague sense of FOMO, or fear of missing out. In group conversations, I sometimes find myself pausing to think while others around me laugh at a reference I do not recognize. My close friends have noticed this pattern and now show me the videos directly, assuming I have not seen them. The positive, though, is that when trends eventually reach my feed, I can remind them of jokes they have already forgotten, which has become a small ongoing dynamic between us. 

Photo from Freepik

Although I may not have TikTok now, I often used its competitor-turned-merger, Musical.ly, growing up. In fourth grade, Musical.ly was the social media platform that my age group used to connect. I used the platform to lip-sync to my favorite singers’ songs. When my friends and I got together, we filmed videos, finding dances that would match the number of people we had at the time. 

After TikTok launched, I decided to download it, but rather than posting videos, I used it for entertainment, scrolling through videos on my feed. When the COVID-19 lockdown was announced, I feared that I would spend excessive amounts of time scrolling because I noticed patterns of doomscrolling on the platform. Since YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels did not exist yet, the time that would have been spent on those platforms was delegated solely to TikTok. Since deleting the app, I have not re-downloaded it. 

Last week, my Principles of Social Media course covered a chapter on TikTok. TikTok was originally launched in China as Douyin in 2016. A few years earlier, Musical.ly was created, focusing on lip-syncing-based content. In 2018, the two platforms merged, migrating all activity to TikTok. TikTok has 1.59 billion active users. The most popular age group on the platform is 25-34, which I expected to be younger. However, if the former Musical.ly users were teens when the platform launched and later migrated to TikTok, it makes sense that the ages are higher. 

TikTok has demonstrated a massive shift towards user-generated content and short-form videos, encouraging other platforms to follow suit, including Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat. I expect other platforms will introduce short-form content as well.