Blog Post #5 - Diffusion of Innovations: TikTok

TikTok is one of the few social media platforms which I feel disconnected from and unequipped to engage with. I stayed off the app and remained a very ant-TikTok kind of guy for the majority of my relationship with the platform. The bulk of the content I saw from the website seemed to be catered towards a younger demographic. Additionally, the dance/ lip-singing videos in my opinion were either extremely cringey, hypersexualized, or both. Most of which would circulate through millions of phones becoming extremely popular due to the platform’s surprisingly ingenuitive algorithm. All that being said, I did download the app, and TikTok now takes up at least 3 hours of screen time for me a week. TikTok won.

I couldn’t stay off the app any longer. It seemed like each of my friend groups continued to share, post, and watch more and more videos on TikTok. Eventually I found enough entertaining niche content which I enjoyed watching and coming back to. I would consider myself to be part of the “late majority” when applying the position to the Law of Diffusion of Innovation theory. I remember the “innovators” and “early adopters” of the app when younger audiences were determined to find and create the new “Vine” (which was another wildly successful social media site similar to TikTok today but with shorter videos). As the controversial rumors involving the Chinese company’s allegedly facial tracking/documenting of its users began to fade, the app’s popularity continued to grow as it entered the “early majority” stage.

TikTok still is filled with cringey and hypersexualized content, but now older audiences are trying to get popular doing the same things creating a toxic cesspool of users being unnecessarily rude, bullied, objectified, and harrassed. The same audience who spread their negativity towards the younger audiences. Additionally the application has very poor censorship. Incredibly inappropriate videos get posted and shared around hundreds of thousands of times before the algorithm removes them. Yes there are a decent amount of positives which came from TikTok, but I still feel strongly that it’s corrupting our newer technological generations, teaching them that such negative or hypersexualized practices are acceptable/encouraged.