TikTok and its mediatic split: the promotion of ecumenical user-generated content alongside Sinocentric media globalization

Global, instantaneous karaoke: a cache of videographic images

For more than 10 years UGC as a form of creative media has been theorized as a ‘virtual village’ (Kim, 2012), a ‘network characteristic’ (Ransbotham et al., 2012), and a ‘cache’ of images (Ager et al., 2010). Yet seldom is UGC discussed or theorized in terms of how it now reorganizes culture. Vastly different to older media such as televisual, analog, and digital photography and filmic imagery, UGC in my deployment of the term refers to a short form creative digital labor through the construction of video-based content that is often made to build online connections. This can take a multitude of forms: shared videos that shape rapport with a fanbase as a means to show different levels of creativity or to demonstrate and disseminate some form of knowledge on a subject. For example: geeks showing off LEGO builds (minibricks) to amateur ice hockey players’ demonstrating their high-level off-ice skills (Zak Bell aka ‘trick shot wizard’) to one famous Australian Indian office worker and his public challenge to give up sugary drinks in 100-days (Rohit Roygre). Others just upload UGC on a whim or fancy. While it many be hard to fathom this type of video sharing two decades ago, UGC’s viralness engenders an undeniable magnitude and global reach through this ease of sharing. Moreover, TikTok’s penetrability is far greater in scalar terms due to the low level of technical skill involved in creating UGC on smartphones if compared to YouTube and its (semi)professional teams of creators/videographers/vloggers.

My focus then is not on advertising or branding content, or what Andrejevic (2009) calls the ‘hegemonic tension between an amateur-led, individual-driven alternative mediascape and a professional-led, institution-driven traditional mediascape’. But I fully acknowledge that all content can be monetized on TikTok and it often is. The Hype House being one example of this neoliberalization where a community of TikTokers lived and made UGC daily. Whether seen as neoliberalized or not, UGC drives a certain type of global creativity and I will analyze short-form videos of fanciful and imaginative ingenuity, another picture of the world inhabited by individuals.

Over a very short period of time TikTok has proven to be a phenomenal extension of the music video for the digital age; a kind of cavorting media with new features. This takes many forms: from mediating emotional reactions via its attractive music dubbing to interactivity and the visibility of users’ comments in real time about various UGC to a kind of high-tech, near instantaneous karaoke. In contrast to music videos which were produced earlier and aired on cable television channels such as MTV since the 1980s, the near half century old music video has fallen to the wayside of scholarship, as discourses about this app might if more attention is not granted to its varied effects on different audiences across the planet (Goodwin, 1992). In response to the possible cultural abandonment of TikTok and to provide a prognosis of its impact on a global scale, this app demands our attention as a DIY-karaoke in the age of neoliberal platformization. It comes to compile, augment, and pastiche existing music material to a UGC template, filtered through an algorithm, producing at the other end of this virtual conveyor belt an amateur form of media. One must then understand this app’s cultural power through its irreverence and the promotion of music, image, and lyrics all made through UGC. Instead of representing and showcasing the musical artist or band through a music video – directly or indirectly – UGC on TikTok is multimedia without ‘the competing demands to showcase a star or performer’ (Vernallis, 2002: 4). Here grassroots performers ape, mimic, meme, or pay tribute to their favorite songs and dance routines or some perform original tracks from their albums or are just jamming, spinning, free-styling, and then uploading their UGC videos. This contrasts sharply with music professionally produced and housed on other platforms such as YouTube or even seen on longstanding music channels.

The amassment of followers through popular UGC on TikTok has meant that trends and emotions are somewhat universally synonymous. In other words, the viralness and compatible reactions to singing and laughing on TikTok is manifest through millions of videos based on UGC. This takes form through a homage to a favorite pop music artist or new performers uploading their songs. However, trivial, mawkish or poignant, this content has helped people virtually to transcend borders while getting noticed in their localized domains. As many have highlighted recently, the pandemic has propelled young unknowns into the limelight on TikTok. For example, the Filipino American singer, Bella Poarch, and her massive following is proof of this platform’s collectivity. This young singer has so far amassed almost 69 million fans and signed a deal with Warner Records. Poarch’s video is perhaps one of the most popular on TikTok in the past year (Ni, 2021). The feel-good melodies by Poarch brought many people together in isolation and showed that music has the power to heal and unite. But this is one commercial success story when the vast majority of UGC is amateurish, sophomoric, gimmicky but amplified by its transcultural media clutter. Elsewhere, Kale (2021) more recently highlighted the new food stars of TikTok and their online ambition to offset redundancy or boredom with snappy videos about how to bake fancy cakes and other delightful desserts. This genre focus on global food culture challenges the process genre of YouTube and the churn of the (mostly) American foodscape on the Food Network. Food like music and dance is a necessary sustenance often downplayed in the pre-pandemic epoch.

Covid-19, Netflix, UNESCO and the domestication of TikTok

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, cyberchondria has since prevailed, with misinformation, frustration, and cynicism proliferating through our hypermediated culture (Serlin, 2010: xiv). Distraction from the vile contempt for professional health management has turned the virus into a syndrome and pushed droves of netizens to retreat online to vent frustration and animus but also to find alternative entertainment at different times in the lockdown period. At the time of this writing, with the global pandemic continuing to lay siege to the planet, media and communication technologies and applications continue to take us further into everyone else’s sovereign media spaces and cultural spheres (Price, 2004). Despite the United States and China’s political policies intent on keeping its own netizens out of their rival’s backyard, platforms enable broader access than satellite and cable broadcast. This hardening and demarcation of nationalities organized on social media is the strategic result of social media companies that have emulated the Hollywood studio system and its corporate oligopoly of the past. Comparisons can be drawn between Hollywood’s orientation of media globalization in its Golden Age (1920–1960) and internet platform companies’ dominance during our on-going Fourth Industrial Revolution (2000–). China is mastering this reorientation in the platform age, however, with its own impactful and powerful companies. But the model is uniquely American in origin: the mid-twentieth century saw US media that strove to be recognized as a national form of cultural production, tools of the state, shedding early cosmopolitan uses for the medium of film to instead posture such media as less ambivalent in terms of its nationality of ownership (Hills, 2002: 4); a correlation we can currently make to Chinese and American-developed platforms. Not quite like media conglomerates and the film studios they now own, platform companies appear like syndicates of concentrated influence and brokers to fill out the mediascape with focused OTT content which is best understood via Netflix.

Like TikTok but in a longform media format, Netflix has actively shown that the alchemy of cultural content intersecting and being consumed on its global streaming platform shows no sign of abating under pandemic conditions. As such, this platform logic is further normalized to all generations that use it: thus, when physical mobility is limited, we find that subscription and use of on-demand content available through Netflix has now outpaced physical attendance at multiplexes; all this intensified by the pandemic but a reality already happening as small screens supersede in-person entertainment. This US-based platform, nonetheless, is one example of cultural globalization’s long reach: to offer more content locally and regionally but through the nodal point of this powerful global meta-organization.

With no major real estate beyond its headquarters in Los Gatos in California and no studio lots to call their own in the vein of Warner Bros and Universal Studios in California, Netflix production potential and over-the-top services mean they become controllers in a new world that is less anchored to physical infrastructure and Taylorist-under-one-roof-set-of-operations. Production hubs are a new keyword for film produced as content. According to Lobato and Lotz, the streaming platform site holds two contradictory realities in balance: ‘Netflix is a single company that has direct-to-consumer subscription relationships with 150 million customers worldwide. This makes it arguably more global than any previous screen producer and distributor. But to make any claim about Netflix requires locating it in a particular place – in a country-specific catalog’ (Lobato and Lotz, 2020: 132). Here Netflix allows hyper-localism to exist alongside competing supranationalism of content which is spreadable in a Jenkins sense (2013). In addition, the streaming company has engaged in multiple strategies to compete with and modify our media market on a global scale: one sterling instance recently is the boom of Korean television and film made possible by Netflix spending 500 million on content development in 2020. Chinese internet companies and their executives’ take great pride in the success of TikTok outside of East Asia and see Netflix as a model to emulate; what is a comparable achievement to Netflix but in minor scale: TikTok’s hyper-locality attempts to partially circumvent the globe while it leaves its domestic borders plied with mostly Sino-only content. In other words, Netflix’s unrivaled globality shows the limitations of TikTok’s globality. But it is the very notion of the world fatigued and wishing to avoid the reality that the pandemic has produced that TikTok has mastered better than Netflix. This is largely due to users’ attention spans and work commitments at home. During the pandemic it has been piecemeal, fragmented viewing of content that was made more practical and appealing when everything moved online.

In other ways, the pandemic’s negative iconography was barely visible on TikTok. It gave media-saturated homes short burst viewing preferences or hours-long scrolling on the Chinese-owned platform, where pre-teens and teens use it as a refuge from the dire new lifeworld offline. Instead, images of folly on the app created not a ‘feeling global’ moment to borrow from Robbins’ (1999) work on internationalism in distress in the wake of the Kosovo War (1999–1998), where extraordinary personal sacrifice (p. 3) are asked of global citizens in times of war. Grim content in our battle with the contagion became antithetical to TikTok’s UGC videos: it would seem network news alone would provide this type of harrowing coverage. After all, seldom is anyone spurred into action on TikTok because the app avoids the politicization of imagery – of the pandemic or anything of a political nature, though some content does get through to users. This mostly superfluous content and its curation is perhaps to keep most of their content light-hearted. Whether that ethos just happens to follow the Chinese censorship boards’ own logic for content on other media and TikTok’s twin, Douyin, the coincidence seems too obvious to not make a correlation here.

Within this specific realm of control over content’s dissemination, TikTok, more broadly, can be theorized as going under not against the mediasphere dictates of UNESCO. Its three media standard principles are not undermined but bent. These principles are: 1) Media Legislation and Regulations; 2) Regulatory Bodies; and 3) Codes of Ethics. These global standards for media accountability are held in high regard by countries across the world but are not legally binding; rather they are obligations, a set of guidelines that are not easily enforceable. The overarching ethos is about freedom of expression that is ultimately what separates a great many countries from China. To be clear, TikTok does follow these rules and abides by North American, the European Union, and other regional media laws. However, TikTok’s overt mediatic split as a way to bypass many of UNESCO’s principles makes their position disingenuous and therefore symbolically invalidates the Chinese government’s notion that its media is globally playing by the same rules. One can gather that TikTok provides mere lip service to UNESCO’s global media principles which then reveals its schizophrenic double-speak in terms of imposed, top-down cultural standards through securitization of content. TikTok, I would argue, mirrors the Chinese government’s exercise of disruption not just of the financial markets but also in the bifurcation of the mediascape: a Chinese app out in the world and its twin at home, customized for domestic rather than pluralistic/hybrid tastes as its cabal of cultural censors push this fissuring process. Still, even as this control and bypassing of UNESCO’s principles is a real method of alternative globalization, it is the ecumenical UGC that gives hope to universal emotional communities, in China and across the planet that keeps people smiling and laughing on this app, especially when pandemics and nationalism strike worldwide. To depoliticize UGC is no doubt China’s aim but to create hierarchies of global culture between nations is where the free flow of UGC, unconstrained and democratic, can challenge not just Chinese cultural hegemony but that of US cultural hegemony as well.

UGC as (narcissistic-cum) localized self-reinvention through its global applicability: TikTok’s building of emotional communities

We can view TikTok as a dominant source of replacement media during the pandemic. Through scrolling, TikTok is replacing prolonged gazing of the past on older media. This emphasis on scrolling through content and craning our necks in the process is a continuation of home entertainment – but from the television age’s sacred space of the living room to the internet age’s bedroom to the platform age’s bed itself – thus, it is no surprise that we continue to bury our heads in the sand of mobile screens (laying down to look up at our smart phone screens with head resting on a pillow) as human computer interaction has increased this activity of scrolling, exponentially (Wang, 2020: 1). This brings me to what TikTok positively accomplishes in a global context. As we know, globalization involves both the macrostructures of community and the microstructures of personhood. But personhood today is often mediated through technology and its different derivations depend on platforms used to sustain new visions and, at the same time, to promote both infotainment and creative expression.

The videation of emotions, however, is how TikTok induces an emptying out of physical interaction to instead provide opposing social characteristics, namely discovery of remote affect, where one finds a separatist online community forming in greater numbers to combat the drought of offline activities. Through the activity of at home app browsing, uploading, and commenting, it is here in some limited capacity that an urgency to create in the domiciliary confines by amateurs came into its own. This furthers the notion that creative work no longer needs to be done in traditional offices, studios, or WeWork spaces. This facilitates a digital nourishment through online activity, one marked by Gen Z, who now demand work-from-anywhere flexibility. Such activities, however, do not create a social closure per-se but one that shows that digital interactions are regnant; where creativity is essential to move the platform economy. Yet, the remote affect that is generated through these increased activities on platforms produces not only the physical side effects of screen exhaustion and ‘next-best-thing’ (NBT) syndrome, but also lead to self-reinvention and democratic audio-visual file sharing. Exacerbating this digital file sharing is the absence and disappearance of physical movement and in-person socializing. Indeed, receptional assimilation for many on TikTok has proven supportive to nomadic comradery in the form of fabricated and fleeting digital social exchanges. Multiple local spheres filtered back optimistic video content which can be seen as a countertrend to the symptoms of Covid-19 and its mediatization of our health crisis and its decontamination. In effect, our digital public sphere is partially remade by the closure of real public spaces since 2020.

Anthony Giddens famously spoke of the overt institutionalization of the public sphere and the resultant outcome in his view of a globalizing modernity that was made up of a complex relation between familiarity and estrangement. He points out that ‘personal life becomes attenuated and bereft of firm reference points: there is a turning inward toward human subjectivity and meaning and stability are sought in the inner self’ (Giddens, 1990: 115). Writing at the dawn of the internet age in the late 1980s, he takes the local shopping mall as metonym. Here this postmodern department store provided a familiarity by way of a certain ease and security but also discord. To upgrade Gidden’s shopping experience, particularly the voyeuristic and community happenstance of public congregating, TikTok provides in the platform age a new case study for virtual not actual communal experiences. The mall like the app provides a shared form of personal engagement with others. ‘We live in a peopled world’ (Giddens, 1990: 143) writes Giddens, where he saw mallgoers accustomed to watching teens on stage in food courts performing parodies and lip-syncing to music videos and choreographed dance routines. Perhaps struck by the outdoor shopping centers he encountered in Palo Alto, California, during his fellowship at Stanford University, where pleasant strolls contrasted the rain and gloom of his home and institutional post at the University of Cambridge.

These activities of encountering people in the physical world were mostly impossible because of the pandemic lasting through 2020 and 2021, and only recently are we welcoming a return to a new normal and social mixing. But whether in physical or platformed spaces we adhere to the primacy of socializing. Thus, a whole younger generation in the years 2020 and 2021 were, in effect, cocooned in cyberspace and came to reinscribe their usual offline cavorting and revelry by using their smartphone cameras in their bedrooms to upload UGC. Via short videos posted to their profile pages, many youth were relocated but not removed from a type of social co-present participation: bobbing and swaying one’s head or body to a beat, clapping, twerking, drilling, or singing along to commemorate an activity not in a mall but in a single dwelling. Indeed, not much has changed in Giddens’ time as ‘pathetic narcissism’ is a durable part of our global leisure experience and now part of a new pandemic time. Bumping into people in malls or through apps is part of the same tradition – our flaneurist tendencies adduced from conditions of global modernity a la Giddens’ notion of it – whereby human feelings continue unbound but in different virtual incarnations and registers provided by platforms like TikTok.

Many of TikTok’s promotional and process-oriented videos could also be correlated to what Elliot and Lemert (2009) have posited before the rise of this app, are global material networks. These networks according to them ‘extend deep into the core of the self and its dispositions, facilitating the creation of new identities nurtured by the intensifying relations between the individual and the globe’ (p. xi). Getting noticed or sharing posts are part and parcel of the digital turn and post-millennial culture after MySpace and Facebook. A type of this new identity is theorized by them in The New Individualism: The Emotional Costs of Globalization, a book which pinpointed a high period for reality television programing in the 2000s. Elliot and Lemert (2009) go on to conceptualize four tenets associated with a new individualism under globalization: ‘a relentless emphasis on self-reinvention; an endless hunger for instant change; a preoccupation with short-termism and episodicity’ (p. xi). Compulsive consumption, instant identity makeovers, micro-celebrity status are some of the features of global individualist culture and TikTok’s guiding principle as a socializing app. Individualism can be traced back to reality television after Giddens’ notional preference for the shopping mall. In this way, Elliot and Lemert see reality television as part of a culture of immersion, profoundly affecting peoples private and public lives. But immersion of public and private is not a new phenomenon. That reality television in the late 1990s and early 2000s is viewed today as a tactic of pillaging ordinariness reminds us that superficiality is alive and well and morphed considerably into the realm of social media during the pandemic. Moreover, Elliot and Lemert posit that a body obsessed mediascape had crystallized for viewers a protocol to reach self-fulfillment through body modification, changes to the body that were often medically obtained, all with cameras documenting these corporeal transformations.

We must remember that this epoch that Elliot and Lemert spoke of was one of nip tuck, all the rage as a new televisual trope. This came to create docu-dramas with high- and-low-end emotional registers as people went under the knife for cosmetic surgery and used reality television as an autoethnographic form of storytelling. This would take on new meaning in the United States and Europe in this period, launching the careers of augmented subjects turned minor celebrities. Former Page 3 buxom model Katie Price and her ITV2 reality television show, Katie & Peter (2004–2009) best embodies this principle. Reality television made essential not a body politics but a body flaunting. Many in Britain tuned in less to see Katie’s voluptuous figure as much as to empathize with her personal plights as mother and rising celebrity (e.g. the trials and tribulations of being a single parent, a U.K. sex symbol, and the amorous times with her then partner Peter Andre) as well as civic causes (e.g. she became a staunch advocate for disabled children due to her experience raising a son with cognitive impairment). TikTok has hallowed out much of the biographical context to which Katie Price’s reality television program came to emphasize, that is, that context does matter when it comes to a television personality’s identity. Not for TikTok. It eradicates the need to provide any contexts about its users, even perpetuates a cavalier attitude toward that knowledge. It instead gives ordinary citizens a massive platform to swerve ‘between educational explainer videos, interior design advice, and “Hey guys, here’s a cool building I found on the internet” monologues, along with thoughtful criticism and unbridled ranting’ (Wainwright, 2021). This kind of piecemeal preference has replaced deeper contextualization or searches about the people we are following online. But it appears that younger generations care less in 2021 about the new Katie Prices on this app. Rather than ‘knowing’ these individuals’ as one might in long-form reality TV programs, it is now digital gimmicks, one’s brand and their footprint across various social media that is enough knowledge for most online admirers/fans.

Moreover, TikTok does not provide its users with blog-like details of its microcelebrity stars because this app’s minimalization of background and biographical details is an extension of the hyper-commodification of everyday discourses (McCarthy, 2007: 17). Due to this app’s demographic, it is noticeably different to the wider audience demographics who watched reality television or used Facebook in the mid-2000s through the mid-2010s. On the contrary, TikTok is unabashedly for teens and twenty-somethings. Hence the migration by many teens off of Facebook onto Instagram and now TikTok, where pop-up trends have created a rite of passage for young people around the world and attest to how trending UGC have mandated a kind of groupism: trends come to dictate or ‘blow up’ a person on the app, something that is, of course, not exclusively to TikTok but the primacy of aimlessly scrolling is undeniable. In our present COVID-19 epoch, it is TikTok’s teenage demographic that needs less of a narrative and are instead presented – by the app and the plethora of UGC videos – the visual snippets of anyone’s life, exposing the countless private lives that continue to be outsourced into our digital public sphere. Whether such material is seen as enjoyable and consumable, ultimately it is these uneventful interactions that become distractions in our world-weary moment. Yet these uneventful interactions are also ‘taken for granted activities’ (Silverstone and Haddon, 1996: 70). While reality television does allow greater awareness of how each social class thinks and spends some of their time, reality television reaffirms, like TikTok, the design of commodification and consumption of our trivialities. All of this media is, therefore, central to the neoliberal doxa: that any common connection within or between social class or beyond those ‘structure of feelings’ is thought of as abstraction, a form of depersonalization out there, ready to call attention to itself; a symptom of frolicsome searches via reality television and social media demands that has brought entertainment to Generation Y and Z types. This demographic of users come to search for self-identity and the individual self through the UGC they consume and often emulate daily. Their scrolling through the flow of content is almost rhythmic in gesture on TikTok, such an action thus dictates our individual preference for image/sound combinations (Lupinacci, 2020: 1). ‘That the individual self—in extending its imperial sway over the social environment—liquidates the solidity and substance of the world into a privatized terrain of needs and desires’ (Elliot and Lemert, 2009: 41) is what TikTok invokes, it becomes a digital galaxy of choice. We can see the app coming to reproduce flights of fancy, (fantasies which, to repeat, are essential to our culture of hyper-individualism) involve, fundamentally, a denial of dependency, thus ‘creative interaction is also prioritized over discursive interaction’ (Zulli and Zulli, 2020: 2).

Factionalization of the world through algorithmic curation and underglobalization on/through TikTok

Writing over 10 years ago about Chinese film and television programs’ novelty and their potential to ‘rival the substantial budgets and lavish production values of their Western counterparts’ (2007: 4), Michael Curtin was prophetic in highlighting a more complicated global terrain characterized by overlapping and, at times, intersecting cultural spheres which served a diverse set of media enterprises based in media capitals around the world. His use of the verb ‘playing’ in the title of his book, Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV inferred that Chinese media enterprises had adapted – at times begrudgingly or haphazardly – to a desire to compromise. Which is true. As many SOEs shifted their social and institutional dynamic to play to the globalizing world’s expectations, these expectations came with a Chinese-centric standard for what globalization should look and feel like. Yet playing in Curtin’s deployment of the term to describe the challenges and opportunities that confronted Chinese commercial media seems today altogether prospective and that verb is now lost to more prescriptive terms such as ‘securitizing’ (Johnson, 2017). In other words, what audiences see in China and how the Chinese film industry adheres to more extreme ideological caution, such a position thus elides any preconceived openness of an earlier era, and TikTok is a cultural product rolled out by a more strident and confident China. Thus, compared to its last president Hu Jintao and his softer cultural policy and more public-facing initiative for internationalization, the country’s standing through the prosperity of the economy in face of the Great Recession in 2007 in the United States, the 2008 Olympic Games, and 2010 Shanghai Expo proved it could compromise but, in the process was staging its global rise. Nevertheless, the central message congealed into Chinese television and film remained in this epoch, undoubtedly was to promote China’s global nationalistic outlook.

My deployment of frolicsome in an earlier section of this essay might sound postmodern in tenor and the term connotes a cheerful disposition. But one cannot frolic endless in any scape–real or mediatic. My term is meant to imply the unintended outcomes of frivolous social sharing and the promise of connection to the ‘world out there’ and a general sense of community and belonging at (inter)national scale, ‘blurring even further the boundaries between what matters at societal and individual levels’ (Lupinacci, 2020: 276). It is therefore TikTok’s prerogative that physical disconnectedness and isolation are not necessarily undesirable when our global society returns to a new normal. A factional world has indeed emerged even before the pandemic.With Xi Jinping’s new view for China, departing, significantly from his predecessor Hu Jintao, the ‘Under-Heaven’ system (Tianxia) is an obvious lowering of globalization down from China and imposing it internationally. According to Callahan:

This switches from the UN model of an international system of legally equal nation-states to a hierarchical tributary system that is centered on Beijing. The goal of the China Dream is to restore China’s ‘natural position’ at the center of the world—as it was before the Industrial Revolution. This new interpretation of Confucianism’s hierarchical system values order over freedom, ethics over law, and elite governance over democracy and human rights (2017: 267).

This geopolitical shift suits a Sinocentric view toward media globalization and represents an opportunistic use of this type of social media. Here I see a problematic computational design mandating this factionalization of the Under Heaven worldview: TikTok’s algorithmic curation. On its own, this is becoming a standard of global platformization, yet what distinguishes TikTok, more dubiously, from other social media such as Facebook’s feed of content and Twitter’s home feeds is TikTok’s obfuscation of ‘interaction or social activity in digital spaces (i.e., activities that connect users)’ (Bhandari and Bimo, 2022: 5). The For You page on TikTok, argues Bhandari and Bimo, ‘take up the entire screen, and it can be difficult to navigate out of this space to find the relatively small icons that will allow users to comment on videos, follow others, send messages, and so on. Visually, such activities are presented a secondary to the content presented by the algorithm’ (pp. 5–6). Such an interrogation of the algorithmized self on TikTok by Bhandari and Bimo is a stunning intervention and expands the field of STS while they provide more cultured observations not typical of quantitative analysis pertaining to this app. As my accounts in previous sections made clear, I provide cultural theory that grasps TikTok’s discursive cultural value globally.

Although I have argued that TikTok expands notions of cultural globalization and provides global affect and humor in its uniting of people around the world, this represents only a partial picture of TikTok’s holistic UGC. In other words, UGC is a testament to felt global affect, where feelings of being globally connected and sharing a humorous or emotive moment becomes intuitive as one billion people use this platform. Simultaneously, and more problematically is TikTok’s use of algorithmic curation, one based on localized feeds only, especially when we look to China and its closed social media ecosystem. It is here that such localized organization on TikTok dominates user experience in terms of what users see, like, and interpret that then becomes a microcosmic reflection of the world online and offline. Yet when that very world is provincial, a local domain tends to dominant ways to reflect on the real world out there, despite the app’s global rollout. Thus, scrolling and searching for UGC is geolocally predetermined for users. This creates a segregation effect, one which emerges by country, by language and preference for self-expression that slows the fluidity of global networking found on older social media. My claim here is not who is building these algorithms that curate content for TikTok, but rather how preselected content is hindering, significantly, the global flows of the past media’s interconnectivity and thus essentializing nation derived UGC for people in small, exclusive communities.

Conclusion

In earlier sections of this article, I spoke effusively for the becoming aspects of cultural globalization, its positive outcomes, largely that users on TikTok have the ability across the planet to create videos through a global process of digital creativity. However, cultural globalization as a melange and hybrid of ‘images, stories, voices and accounts which provides a global imagination as a collective way of seeing’ (Orgad, 2012: 3), is now being miniaturized to topophilic preferences and deglobalized outlooks. In other words, algorithmic pre-selectivity is stratifying people into factionalized national users. Thus, I argued here that global interconnectivity is being threatened by content without context and more importantly, a creation of clannish attitudes and worldviews, driving a multitude of small groups from within a larger container like the nation-state. Many Tik Tok users are never aware of the endless possibilities that global interconnectivity can provide. Here ‘the algorithm does the work that ‘following’ does on other platforms, but more effectively and efficiently’ (Bhandari and Bimo, 2022: 5). Despite all of these contradictions, TikTok is still an anomaly in relation to China’s global technological innovation and an app that has become a household name and the first kind of social media recognition for the country’s platform industry.