Main Street Magazine Spring '23

Dragging your heels home from a heinously boring three-hour lecture,
your mind is drained of any energy you may have had prior. You are
far too tired to collect your dirty clothes or read that book on your
nightstand or go to the gym. You want to relax after class and reward
yourself. As you finally grip the knob of your bedroom door, your
backpack slumps onto the floor with an abrasive thud. You crawl
into your unmade, disheveled bedsheets once again as your weary
finger approaches that music note in the corner of your home screen:
TikTok.
The short-form video app has taken our generation by storm since
its debut in 2016. Though at first just another social media app
comparable to a distorted Vine or a strangely upgraded Musical.ly,
it quickly gained popularity and was the most downloaded app of
2022 with over 600 million downloads worldwide. You might relate to
spending hours on TikTok, sending ten videos to your roommate who
is three feet away from you, or getting lost in the comments section
and letting the same clip of a Doja Cat song play 45 times on loop
until you finally notice.
Why does T ikTok possess this grip on us? Why are
we relinquishing hours on end to this app? And most
importantly - what is it doing to us?
The design of this app is like nothing we have seen before and has
proven so popular that many other apps have added similar features,
such as YouTube Shorts or Instagram Reels, essentially letting people
reupload TikToks on other platforms. With shorter videos, the app
is deceptively appealing to those living busy and highly scheduled
lives; it may seem like a better use of free time to watch a few
TikToks if there’s not enough time to read or watch a full movie. The
endless scroll of videos, however, deceives users of time passing
and promotes further engagement as a new video begins every few
seconds, and the experience is refreshed.
Each TikTok has a comment section that pops up over the video
while it’s still playing. Other platforms have not previously allowed
this, making TikTok’s comment sections much more accessible and
in turn, the comments have a much more important role in the app’s
user experience. When we watch a video on TikTok, many of us will
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