What happened when TikTok was viewed as an instrument of our minds and how we viewed it in the age of the digital age
Just as our relationship with media shifted when it entered our homes, it has continued shifting as it invades our smartphones. These devices, which are tightly integrated into the ways that we think and process information, have allowed TikTok to position itself as an extension of our minds. If we want to extricate ourselves from the app’s grasp, we must first understand how the mind works in the age of the technologized self.
The transition from the cinema to TV in the mid-20th century allowed moving images to enter our homes. Once constrained to the theater, this content began to live alongside us—we watched it as we got ready in the mornings, ate dinner, hosted guests, spent time with family. Marshall McLuhan noticed that as moving pictures were taken out of the dark, anonymous theaters and placed in our domestic spaces the mechanics of how we recieved, processed, and related to them changed. As newly engrained features of our dwellings—which Heidegger recognizes as deeply intertwined with our sense of being in the world—they took on a familiar casualness. Donald Horton and R. Richard have a paper on “para social relationships with the people they saw through these screens.” Home audiences began to see mass media personas as friends and thus gave broadcasters more power to manipulate them at a more personal level.
Once, platforms sought to be device-agnostic, universal purveyors of content that would be accessible to anyone who might want it. As Kyle Chayka writes, this allowed companies to promise users that they can use any device to circumvent any particularity on the site. Google’s mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible” is in many ways emblematic of this logic. Discussions have rarely focused on the specifics of our encounter with these platforms—the instruments used, context, or materiality.
Julia Fox’s TikTok tour of her New York City apartment went viral last week. She said at the beginning of the video she never thought in a million years she would do this. I know I will be roasted, but hopefully someone can watch this and see if I’m not doing so bad.
Fox’s video put me in mind of the TikTok creator Emily Feret, who is normalizing normal by talking about her hodgepodge diet, the travails of her daily getting-ready routine and showing off her home’s nonaesthetic playroom. I’ve written before about Feret, who serves as a corrective to how the perfection (or performance thereof) of certain momfluencers can worm into your brain, even if you strongly suspect that their online lives are something of a put-on.
While those glossy moms of social media — with their spotless backsplashes and blown-out hair — are still very influential and attractive to advertisers, I do feel that we’re seeing, for lack of a better term, a vibe shift among moms online, moving away from the unattainable ideal and gravitating toward content that actually resembles real life.