By Onoir O’ Brien
TikTok Overview
The Platform we know as Tik Tok was created in China as ‘Douyin’ and is an iOS and Android app that allows users to record and share short video clips using their smart device. The company ‘ByteDance’ launched Douyin in 2016 and rebranded the platform to ‘TikTok’ in 2017 for markets outside of China. The social media platform is used to make a variety of short-form videos, from dance, comedy, and education, lasting from 3 seconds to 3 minutes. All of their servers are based in the market where the respective app is available. When President Donald Trump threatened to ban Tik Tok in America in August 2020, Tik Tok’s CEO Kevin A. Mayer resigned, and Vanessa Pappas stepped into the position and started working on Trump’s publicly declared threat to pull Tik Tok from the American public failing its negotiations with Microsoft or another “very American” company. According to a new court filing on 7th of December 2020, the U.S. government is appealing the ruling that blocked the Trump administration’s ban on TikTok. The app has been banned by the Government of India since June 2020 and 223 other Chinese apps have been banned in Pakistan around the same time. ByteDance was reportedly valued at $75 billion in 2018, making it the most valuable start-up in the world.
TikTok Academic Literature
Tik Tok, only became available worldwide, including the United States, after merging with another Chinese social media service, Musical.ly, on August 2, 2018. within its first year of operations TikTok became No. 1 in free app downloads in many countries. In America TikTok has been downloaded more than 130 million times reaching 2 billion downloads worldwide, according to data from mobile research firm Sensor Tower, and it’s interesting to note that these massive figures exclude Chinas Android users. In the United States, many celebrities, like Will Smith, and Justin Bieber, joined TikTok boosting the platform’s international awareness. On 3 September 2019, TikTok and the National Football League of the United States (NFL) announced a multi-year partnership. The partnership created new marketing opportunities, such as sponsored videos and hashtag challenges. In July 2020, TikTok, excluding Douyin, reported nearly 800 million active monthly users worldwide after less than four years of existence. During the Covid-19 years, many countries saw schools closed, but young Academics continued to thrive and connect by using TikTok, creating a different kind of academic community, one in which young adults and adolescents created their own niche, and an aesthetic that mirrors the world they once knew.
This Tik Tok Community is called ‘Dark Academia’ and is defined as a subculture with a heavy emphasis on reading, writing, and the dissemination of knowledge. Many of the posts tagged with the Dark Academia hashtag have received over 18 million views; there are more than 100,000 posts on Instagram. And even though Dark Academia predates the pandemic, it now becomes more important for students to feel part of an online community. However recent studies have suggested that Platforms Like Tik Tok are addictive, can shorten memory span and create aversive psychological Random Reinforcement behaviour, USC professor and author Dr. Julie Albright discussed this science in a Forbes interview with John Koiester, she stated ‘You will just be in this pleasurable dopamine state, carried away. It is almost hypnotic; you’ll keep watching and watching. Dr. Julie Albright
Tik Tok Fun Fact: One of the main reasons TikTok hired Kevin Mayer was because he was a former Disney executive and Tik Tok thought by putting a more American face on operations that it wouldn’t encounter U.S. government scrutiny, unfortunately the ‘Mickey Mouse’ plan did not work, and Kevin Meyers only lasted 100 days before he resigned!
References/Notes
DSouza, Deborah. ‘What Is TikTok?’ Investopedia. Accessed 10 January 2021. https://www.investopedia.com/what-is-tiktok-4588933.
Isaac, Mike. ‘TikTok Chief Executive Kevin Mayer Resigns’. The New York Times, 27 August 2020, sec. Technology. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/technology/tiktok-kevin-mayer-resign.html.
Koetsier, John. ‘Digital Crack Cocaine: The Science Behind TikTok’s Success’. Forbes. Accessed 10 January 2021. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/01/18/digital-crack-cocaine-the-science-behind-tiktoks-success/.
‘TikTok’. In Wikipedia, 18 December 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=TikTok&oldid=995008835.
Fortune. ‘TikTok’s Most Vocal Defender Is Now Its New Interim CEO’. Accessed 10 January 2021. https://fortune.com/2020/08/27/tiktok-new-ceo-vanessa-pappas-kevin-mayer-bytedance/.
TechCrunch. ‘US Government Appeals the Injunction against Its TikTok Ban’. Accessed 10 January 2021. https://social.techcrunch.com/2020/12/28/u-s-government-appeals-the-injunction-against-its-tiktok-ban/.
