Living with TikTok: The Transition from the Cinema to TV in the Age of Mobile Internet and the emergence of a Universal User Experience

With TikTok, immanence is exchanged for transcendence. TikTok promises to reveal your deepest desires if you want it to, because that’s the direction they want to go. The interface of both Youtube and TikTok has screens on top of the screens that let you navigate the ocean of content, while theinstagram interface does not have screens at all.

Take, for example, the transition from the cinema to TV that occurred in the mid-20th century and enabled 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. While moving pictures were taken out of the dark, anonymous archives of the theater and placed within our domestic spaces, they changed the mechanics of how we received, processed and related to them. 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. Viewers increasingly developed “parasocial” relationships with the people they saw through these screens, as Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl note in the foundational paper in which they coin the term. Audiences at home grew to see mass media as friends, giving broadcasters the means 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 reported, this allowed companies to promise users that they could use any device to deal with nationality, identity or class, while 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. Discussion rarely focuses on the specifics of our encounter with these platforms.

Last week, Julia Fox posted a TikTok tour of her New York City apartment that pretty quickly went viral. She said at the beginning of the video that she believed in transparency and never thought in a million years that she would do this. “And I know I’m going to get roasted, and whatever, but hopefully maybe someone can watch this and be like, ‘OK, well, maybe I’m not doing so bad.’”

I was inspired by Emily Feret, a TikTok creator who is normal by talking about her diet, getting ready, and showing off her playroom. Feret is a corrective to how the perfect performance of certain moms can worm their way into your brain even if you think their online lives are not all that bad.

I feel that the shift toward less ideal lifestyles among social media mothers is happening, and it is because they are still very influential and attractive to advertisers.

It’s a different world now, with TikTok and other tight-knit book communities rocketing titles to fame overnight. Richards wanted to try her luck.

She had no idea that, within a matter of days, millions of people would see her video, and her father’s book would rocket to the top of Amazon’s Best Seller list.

Whether it was the gripping thriller, the author’s unassuming Vermont mien, or the efforts of a proud, tech-savvy daughter, the story of Lloyd Devereux Richards and “Stone Maidens” struck a chord.

“I saw how much time and effort and passion my dad put into his book. She told CNN that she knows what a great storyteller he is. He never gave up on his writing and was always positive.

This particular episode falls under a social media genre best described as “Young people giving their elders love and recognition on a platform the latter doesn’t understand.” It’s a fruitful one, full of parents just like Lloyd Devereux Richards who wake up one morning to find their talents, hobbies or peculiar habits have been broadcast to the world – and won them legions of admirers.

“My dad wasn’t really sure what TikTok is, but he has been so pleased and grateful,” Richards says. “I love how people are appreciating him. Some brands have commented. Several weeks ago, these people didn’t know who he was. Tootsie Roll is cheering him on.

Lloyd Devereux Richards: A Late Bloomer and a Superlarious Story for the TikTok community in the 21st Century

A lot of people are struggling with a project and this has given them the motivation to keep going. Being a late bloomer is a feeling everyone can relate to.

We can see who is following and watching us. Richards says that they read as many comments as they can. “There are young people who have said they’ve never bought a book for pleasure, or they don’t read a lot. And now they’re sitting down, they’re reading and they’re loving it.”

Now, Lloyd Devereux Richards has more than 360,000 TikTok followers and a brand new story to tell. Though it would be very un-authoritarian of him to give all of his plans away at the same time, he does have plans for the future.