Watch out: a thirty-something is about to talk about TikTok
Hi there, welcome to Plain English. I’m Jeff; JR is the producer; and this is episode 204 of Plain English, the best podcast for practicing English. That’s because we got a bit slower than native speed, so you can understand every word. And if you miss a word, not to worry: you can find a transcript of the program at PlainEnglish.com/204.
Coming up today: TikTok has a billion downloads. If you don’t know what it is, I will tell you about the latest craze to sweep the world. And I am cautioning you: this is all secondhand. I am not a TikTok user, but I did get some good input from JR, who is one. I have a funny quote about adults on social media and the phrasal verb today is “serve up.”
Inside the TikTok craze
Imagine watching a 15-second video of a person dressed in regular clothes; American country music plays in the background. He jumps up, and the moment he lands on the ground he is magically transformed into a cowboy. Now, do you think you could watch hundreds of videos of different people recreating this exact scenario over and over and over again? If you can, congratulations! You are ready to join the one billion other users in the world of TikTok.
For the uninitiated, TikTok is a video-sharing and social media app launched in 2017 by Chinese company ByteDance. It provides a forum for users to create video content in small bites to share with others—and, unlike most social networks, the intended audience of your TikTok posts are not friends, but strangers. The app serves up one random video after another and you, as a user, say whether you like the video or not. Over time, it learns what you like. You can also search for content by topic.
TikTok’s content is heavy on the creation of snippets of video with musical accompaniment and oftentimes the videos include dancing or costumes. Many TikTok users were originally members of the app musical.ly (where users could lip-synch to their favorite songs and post them). TikTok bought that app, so the culture on TikTok is heavy on music and dancing. As you might imagine, the app is wildly popular with teenagers and young adults. So popular, it has about a billion downloads.
How do these 15-second videos become so popular? The younger users of TikTok have grown accustomed to receiving rapid-fire information on the internet. They are also used to filming themselves constantly. And they feed on likes and rewards of traditional social media networks.
TikTok leans into all these trends. Like the other social media platforms, there also is a sense of accomplishment when a video generates a lot of likes. Fifteen seconds of content creation is very doable and expectations are pretty low, so practically anyone with a phone can participate. TikTok provides the tools to edit videos right inside the app, so it makes the learning curve much shorter. Not only that, but the most creative youngsters see this as a viable career. If you’re laughing—stop. Instagram and YouTube didn’t seem like viable careers when they first started, either.
One of the most popular features of TikTok is the user challenges. This is where a video becomes popular and other users will re-create it in their own way—the challenges become popular with hashtags. In the country-music example I shared earlier, users play back the same country song and replay a similar scenario. The user (or sometimes even a pet!) “drinks” a liquid labeled “yee yee juice” which transforms the person into a cowboy or cowgirl. The song used in the challenge, (which was made popular on TikTok) “Old Town Road”, launched the artist, Lil Nas X, into stardom, sitting on the Billboard Top 100 chart for a record-breaking 19 consecutive weeks.
Another popular challenge, the “Git Up Challenge”, is a dance challenge where users recreate the line dance by artist Blanco Brown and the song “The Git Up”. This could be today’s version of “The Macarena,” for those of you who remember that one. No controversy, heated debates, or political strife; just people dancing and having a good time.
Compared to other social media apps, TikTok does things a little differently. The closest comparable app to TikTok would most likely be the now-defunct app, Vine. Vine, like TikTok, appealed to younger audiences by providing a platform to share even shorter videos (Vine videos were just six seconds).
Wherever the kids are, the corporations will follow—with mixed results. Chipotle, an American chain restaurant, is using the TikTok app this month to promote its “Boorito” challenge by having users create a before and after video of themselves dressed up like a Chipotle burrito for Halloween to win prizes. I think that would work better than whatever the political newspaper The Washington Post comes up with on TikTok.
Other apps have found some interesting ways in which its platform can become useful in short formats. Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok (and also owned by ByteDance) is being used in travel videos. Some moderately-popular travel destinations in China have seen their attendance soar after hitting it big on Douyin, for example.
To me, the most interesting thing about TikTok’s is its use of artificial intelligence to determine what content to show you based on your likes, what you watch, and your location. So, what you see on the app is what the machine thinks you would like most, in that moment. It not only learns what you like, but it analyzes other factors, such as the time of day. What do you like to watch in the morning? What do you like just before bed? Things like that.
Not to spoil the fun, but a discussion of social media would not be complete if we didn’t also touch on some of the grown-up implications of TikTok. One is the use of data. TikTok’s users are predominantly young—many really young, like, not even teenagers yet. TikTok paid a fine to the US government for collecting the data on children, and serving up some age-inappropriate content to young children. Social media and politics are often intertwined these days, and Western media is quick to point out the conspicuous absence of videos about the protests in Hong Kong on the Chinese-owned app, whereas protests in other locations are widely featured in TikTok videos.
I warned you at the beginning that I was a thirty-something attempting to talk about TikTok, so when I need to know what all the kids are doing these days, I consult JR, who is twenty-something. JR says you can open TikTok when you have nothing else to do—otherwise, it’s so addictive, you’ll watch TikTok all day and you won’t get any work done. JR has fine-tuned his preferences, so he usually gets videos about comedy or nature, the outdoors. I do not have TikTok, so I asked JR to perform an experiment. I asked him to open the app and tell me the first three videos he saw. He sent me screen grabs of them, and two were videos of young people doing songs or dancing. The third video that came up was someone jumping off a cliff. Later videos showed someone taking pearls out of mussels. So that’s a quick peek into JR’s TikTok feed.
JR also explained to me that this is how the Baby Shark song got so popular. I asked him about it after the crowd was singing it at a baseball stadium.
A couple of hello’s today. I want to say hi to Abolfazl from the city of Isfahan, Iran, and he is practicing English to help in his career in IT. And a big hello to Gustavo and Arthur; they are brothers, eleven and thirteen years old, and they listen in the car with their dad on the way to school.
One thing that listeners consistently tell me is that they love the topics on the program. If you even find yourself thinking, I loved today’s topic—I wish I could learn more about TikTok, then you’re in luck. Every Monday and Thursday, JR sends out an email with links to the English-language articles I use to prepare the show. It’s a great way to learn more about your favorite episode topics and to practice your reading at the same time. If you’d like to practice your English reading and engage more with our topics, then make sure you’re on our e-mail list. Just visit PlainEnglish.com/mail and enter your details.
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