TikTok Ethnography Project
TikTok, a video sharing social media platform, is used for dancing, watching people drink wine in their pyjamas, videoing their dogs, and trying to throw ping pong balls into seemingly impossible gaps. At a time when most of us were forced to be home for large periods of time, the digital door was the only one we could access to step into the outside world and interact with the everyday.
TikTok has played a crucial part in coordinating BLM protests, it has been used to explore issues of race and gender, historical and colonial violence, and to disrupt a Trump rally. It is used by factory workers in Turkey and China to highlight the precarity of their work. It has also led to TikTok users explicitly theorising about the role of algorithm in how our online lives are structured. Leading some to refer to ‘their algorithm’, the ‘intimate relationship’ they have with it, and how they try to negotiate with it.
Through this confusing array of alternate worlds within TikTok, many of our interviewees emphasised a sense of belonging, an intimacy, a sense of ‘community’. What is it about this app that makes it appealing for many? That seems to create a sense of belonging? Why were people taking to TikTok during the pandemic? How does the platform allow for the conceptualisation of the challenges the pandemic presents?
The TikTok Ethnography Collective is a collective of students, lecturers, researchers, anthropologists and artists who have come together to ask what it might mean to collaborate on a research project in the digital world. This project is both an ethnography of TikTok and a questioning of how we can blur the boundaries between pedagogy and research. How can we work collaboratively with a diverse range of actors within the academy and beyond in a meaningful way? How can we re-think what it means to conduct research? This project explores the anthropological and pedagogical possibilities offered by working together to explore the world of TikTok.