Reading this book made me think of all my academic colleagues who are prejudiced against social networks and TikTok in particular. Without bias, in a descriptive, even rigorous way, and with respect to different contexts, a phenomenon that touches the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world is presented here. Thanks to the authors, the reader can gain fundamental information and understand how TikTok works through concrete examples.
The book’s chapters cover the historical development of short videos on the Internet, TikTok’s infrastructure as a platform, communities, activism, economic model, governance, and finally, they consider the future of TikTok as a creative platform. The research then takes as its source interviews with short video creators and community members.
However, I was most interested in what the authors of the book had to say about the formal aspect of the videos and about TikTok users. There wasn’t a lot, but that’s understandable because that wasn’t their goal either. I could summarize the essential thesis for a successful video form as follows:
– emphasis on the music element
– platform supported practices: Duet, Stich, Use this Sound, effects and filters
– more showing than telling
– repetition of some successful formal practices (face zoom, panoramic shot)
As I wrote, it’s not much and not fundamentally revelatory, but I still find these insights refreshing. At least because the authors have avoided the traditionally repeated claim that TikTok is fast, which I don’t think is true (I’ll discuss that another time).
One of the main theses of the book (its starting point rather than its conclusion) is the understanding of TikTok as a music platform. Despite the book’s focus on short videos, the music component is clearly a priority for the authors. On the one hand, this is understandable, as TikTok has a predecessor in Musica.ly and the Duet and Use this Sound features clearly indicate a relationship to music. On the other hand, however, this misses out on understanding the phenomenon of short videos in their complexity. This is similar to film theorists focusing only on the visual component (as they did and still do). Especially from an audience perspective, I can imagine watching TikTok videos without sound. Why else would the videos have subtitles with transcripts of monologues and dialogue?
A notable observation in this context is the reminder of the Quibi platform, which was supposed to be a competitor to TikTok more connected to the American audiovisual industry. Quibi ended up being a huge failure and losing a lot of money, which the authors of the book justify by saying that short videos are not just about audiovisual content that is short. Short videos are mainly about cultural practice, creative expression and social interaction (p. 192). In other words, it is not about Hollywood studios and TV stations trying to push their content onto TikTok. If the traditional audiovisual industry sees TikTok as competition, it will have to transform and adapt its output. It’s not enough to just shorten the footage and crop the frame. Inspiration from TikTok needs to look different.
The authors of the book sum up the magic of TikTok’s success with the words “spreadable, templatable, imitable” (p. 192). Elsewhere in the book, they write about replicability (p. 18) and repeatedly refer to memes (p. 163: TikTok is described as a “meme machine”). These are, in my opinion, the main reasons for TikTok’s success in proving to be an extremely effective tool for spreading viral videos. But this is not an evolutionist conception of memetics, as described, for example, by Daniel Dennett in his book From Bacteria to Bach and Back (I will also discuss this another time). Kaye, Zeng and Wikström keep their feet on the ground and describe the memetic principle of TikTok as more of a community process of group creation, but one that still has its authors and recipients. Perhaps if we could get away from this schematic model of communication, we could understand what TikTok and short videos really entail.
SNAPlab 