I had never heard of TikTok prior to a friend mentioning it in 2020. Having taken a break from social media in 2019, it was only when a pandemic was declared that I hopped back on, sparingly, to see what people were up to.
Fast forward to 2024. By now I was much more familiar with TikTok, not because I had an account, but because friends would send me links to short videos. And, because I would hear about it discussed in the media.
I have always had mixed feelings about social media. On one hand, it can be a great way to connect and see what people are up to. The darker side is that people are addicted, spending more time doing what I call The Zombie Scroll rather than spending time in the presence of real people.
Less digital interfacing, more actual in-the-flesh human relating I’m thinking is best.
I know from watching The Social Dilemma that social media platforms are designed to keep us hooked. I have done The Zombie Scroll countless times. Catching myself.
Swipe right. Swipe left. Scroll. Like. Comment. Swipe right. Swipe left. Scroll.
Perhaps we forget that the early inception of Facebook resulted from a disgruntled college kid who created a platform where a bunch of college boys could rate girls as ‘hot’ ‘or not’. From Wikipedia:
On October 28, 2003, 19-year-old Harvard University sophomore Mark Zuckerberg is dumped by his girlfriend, Erica Albright. Returning to his dorm, Zuckerberg writes an insulting post about Albright on his LiveJournal blog. He creates a campus website called Facemash by downloading photos of female students from house face books, then allowing site visitors to rate their attractiveness. After traffic to the site crashes parts of Harvard's computer network, Zuckerberg is given six months of academic probation.
What began as a crude gesture of revenge has now ‘blossomed’ into one of the world’s largest online repositories for all things ‘social’. Now we too swipe right, swipe left.
I often wonder how swiping and scrolling has rewired our brains, even as adults. We are masters of our destiny, able to cast off the unwanted, the unattractive, the fill-in-the-blank…Like, don’t like. Block. Erase. Unfriend. It’s all so swift and emotional.
But it’s not all bad. There are pictures of people’s pets. And birthday wishes. And families. And humour. And couples posting ‘happy anniversary’ even though they are sitting across the couch from each other. I still find many things so bizarre. How we have changed. The things we do on there.
Everything is spectacle now. The mundane. The joyous. The…
We raise our social currency through ‘likes’ and ‘loves and…
It’s the new way we are ‘seen’. We glean our ego satisfaction, our attention, our connection. Much often through digital interfacing. It almost doesn’t seem believable. And yet it’s the new ‘real’.
I guess it’s the way average people get to feel important through a media lens?
We each get our 15 minutes of fame, every day, in our own little digital circles.
I’m not sure. I can be harsh. Perhaps unfair in my assessments.
I struggle with it.
Back to TikTok. I decided to do an experiment. I created an account and then uploaded a recent video I produced. A simple cut of me doing a cover song in my modest studio.
I then paid approximately $60 for a 2 day campaign to have my video pushed out into TikTok world.
And so it began. Within 10 minutes, I had 42 likes. Dopamine SMASH.
Within one hour, I had hundreds of likes. SUPER dopamine SMASH.
By the end of the first 24 hour period, I had almost 8000 likes. MEGA dopamine SMASH.
Contrast this with Facebook where you can pay $100 for a 5 day campaign and perhaps get 10 impressions.
Can you see where this is going?
By the end of the 2-day campaign, these were the stats for the video:
Almost 18,000 views. Almost 1400 likes.
I can attest - when you are getting hundreds of likes every hour, you are drawn back to your device to see that shiny red notification that screams AFFIRMATION.
But is it real?
I have no idea how TikTok operates their algorithms. I truly have no idea if almost 18,000 people viewed my video. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter to me. Because what I discovered, is that if Facebook’s ability to get people hooked on notifications is like cotton candy to a baby, TikTok has supercharged the model like cocaine to a baby.
We are all babies, because we will all respond to this level of attention and affirmation through our primitive emotional apparatus. And then, we will want more. We will need more.
We will have found ‘love’, and we will keep checking that notification button to see how many new dopamine hits have been served up for us. Intoxicating.
It’s scary and sad that we have been reduced to the Pavlovian response generated by a lit up notification on a digital screen. All while our behaviour is being tracked and recorded. Data, the new gold.
TikTok has actualized their model in a way that convinces the average person that their post is going ‘viral’. Only it’s not. It’s primarily a trick to prime your dopamine centres. And it works. You stay on there. You post more. You watch more.
I have no idea how people keep up with it all. Facebook. Instagram. Twitter. TikTok. And on. And on.
It’s overwhelming.
I began to view several other pages of people I both know and don’t know. Each of them had at least one video that had several hundred to a few thousand views.
Interesting.
Like I said, I’m not sure. I can be harsh. Perhaps unfair in my assessments.
Cotton Candy Dreams. Beware.
Only Love,
FG